Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1890 — A NEW HAT MATERIAL. [ARTICLE]

A NEW HAT MATERIAL.

Formerly Waste Stuff It Is Now Used for Derbys. Many of the cheap Derby hats that will be worn on the streets of St. Louis this spring, says the GlobeDemocrat, will be made of a new material qf which the hatters have just got hold. The stuff is called linters. It is the short cotton left on the seed after the cotton has been ginned by the cotton raiser. He sells his cotton to the merchant and the seed to a mill that makes cotton seed oil. The miller puts the seed through another gin, specially made to clean short dotton from the seed. In an oil mill of small capacity several bales of cotton are annually ginned from the seed in this way. The fiber is broken and very short, and up to a few months ago the mills sold it to stuff bedding with. Its price was about half that of average cotton. The negroes in -the South were the buyers generally, ...but occa- j sionally the mills would get a good big order from concerns that made pil- ' lows and mattresses. Suddenly some- j body found out that it could be made to imitate felt for cheap hats. The experiment then of making hats of linters was tried on a large scale last winter by a New York factory, and the hats were sold to retailers very cheaply for introduction. The test showed that the hats-stood wear, and the oil mills were at once called on by the manufacturers to make contracts for all the linters they could get off the cotton seed. Now linters has gone away up in pi-iee, and is only a few cents a pound cheaper than cotton. The discovery is likely to have a lowering effect upon the kind of Derbys which have sold for $3; and, in fact, some merchants are already using the linters Derbys as “leaders” for their other goods, selling them at half the cost of the felt hat.