In 1932 Newman Hancock, a cotton breeder in the Agricultural Experiment Station, approached Dr. Kenneth Hertel, of the Physics Department, seeking assistance in measuring the degree to which characteristics that would make cotton crops more valuable were being bred into various cotton varieties. Hertel and associates in the Physics Department developed the random fibrograph that measured the length of baled cotton. Slightly larger than a typewriter and operating on direct or alternating current from an ordinary light socket, it charted the length of the fibers in the sample, which resulted in a “fibrogram.” With the machine, Hertel was able to quickly determine the average length, the standard deviation from the average length, and the median length of any percentage of the sample. The machine could be used on cotton in all stages of manufacture, from the raw to the finished product.
Other instruments measuring cotton strength (the Pressley, developed by E. H. Pressley of the Arizona Experiment Station) and fineness (Arealometer, developed at the UT Fiber Research Laboratory) followed. The Stelometer, which gave a very rapid measurement of strength, tenacity, and elongation of cotton, was also developed at the UT lab. Spinlab, a local company established in 1948 as a spin-off company of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, which was to supply nuclear instrumentation to the emerging declassified nuclear research industry, refined and improved the instruments. By the 1950s Spinlab had become the world leader in research and development in measuring the properties of cotton and other fibers.