Modern Marvels: Cotton

Go beyond the "dirt to shirt" tale of textiles to see the myriad places cotton turns up in this illuminating hour. The complete story of cotton, from ancient India to today's technologies. For over a decade, MODERN MARVELS has brought grand stories to life. The ultimate celebration and investigation of engineering excellence. Celebrating ingenuity, invention and imagination brought to life on a grand scale, MODERN MARVELS tells the fascinating stories of the doers, dreamers and sometime-schemers who created everyday items, technological breakthroughs and man-made wonders. For a fuzzy white fiber, cotton has played a starring role in history. It has created empires, launched at least one civil war, jumpstarted the Industrial Revolution and become the world's most ubiquitous fabric. Follow cotton's progress "from dirt to shirt", as they say in the textiles trade, and the lesser-known journey it makes into thousands of products, including gunpowder, cattle feed, plastics, photographic film, lipstick, and ice cream. Trace cotton's ancient origins and examine the many innovations in which cotton had a hand, like the cotton gin, which separated cotton from seed and also fueled both oppression and progress in America and England. And don't forget that evil critter, the boll weevil!