John Daniel Rust was born near Necessity, Stephens County, Texas, the son of Susan Minerva Burnett and Benjamin Daniel Rust, a Confederate army veteran who had moved to Texas to farm and teach school. His parents died when he was in high school, and his early inclination toward invention was frustrated by the frequent moves he made from one relative's house to another.
Supported by a cousin, he attended Western College in Artesia, N. Mex. , for one year, but dropped out.
Rust picked cotton, worked as a carpenter, and joined the Milton Colony, a utopian community in Oklahoma. Soon he moved on, working in the lead and zinc mines near Joplin, Mo. , and trying his hand at various inventions.
During World War I he served with the army at Camp Stanley in Texas; this period was distinguished mainly by Rust's reading of works on political economy by Charles P. Steinmetz, the General Electric mathematician and socialist.
At the age of thirty, Rust, who had taken a correspondence course in mechanical drawing, began to work for Ira Marriage, of Wichita, Kans. , in making improvements on the wheat combine. Rust then worked with the Gleaner Combine Company in Independence, Mo. His mind returned to his own efforts to design a mechanical cotton picker, however, and he reported that a solution came to him in a dream--the key to his machine was to be a smooth spindle around which the cotton fibers could be twisted and pulled loose from the boll.
Rust returned to Texas and settled in Weatherford, where he set up a shop in a sister's garage. He raised money for his project from his sisters and others, and made his first patent application on January 27, 1928. Late in 1928 Rust was joined by his brother Mack. John Rust was sometimes referred to as the "idea man, " while Mack Rust was "the practical worker. "
In 1930 the two brothers moved to the Llano cooperative community in Louisiana, and then to New Orleans. The following year they put a machine in the field--"the first, " according to Rust, "so far as I know, ever to harvest a bale of cotton a day. " In 1933 an improved machine of his construction picked five bales in one day. In 1934 two brothers worked at the further improvement of the cotton picker. In February, 1935, in an article entitled "The Revolution in Cotton, " Oliver Carlson called national attention to the Rust machine, emphasizing that it would throw many thousands of cotton pickers out of work during the worst depression in the nation's history.
In 1936 experimental fieldwork also attracted wide attention to both the machine and the Rust brothers' attempts to introduce it in a socially responsible way. An unsigned article in Literary Digest (Sept. 5, 1936) called the brothers "professed Socialists" and headed its story "Cotton-gin Rival: Inventors Fear Mechanical Picker's Effect on Labor; Propose Relief. " The brothers appealed to the federal government somehow to cushion the impact of threatened unemployment, and toyed with the idea of either turning the machine over to a tenant farmers' cooperative or leasing the device only to planters who agreed not to lay off field hands. They also conceived the idea of putting profits into a philanthropic foundation that would aid displaced workers.
Also in 1936 the Rust Cotton Picker Company was established in Memphis, Tenn. , and the brothers continued to work on their machine. The coming of World War II, however, cut them off from strategic materials and forced them to suspend full-time operations. The brothers went to work for the Rust Engineering Company of Pittsburgh, which was owned by relatives.
During the winter of 1942-1943, Mack Rust moved to Arizona with several machines. The two brothers were never reunited. In 1944, on a trip to Washington, D. C. , to obtain new patents, John Rust was able to interest the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company in making his cotton picker on license. Turning his new resources over to the nonprofit World Foundation, which he established in 1944, he lived off his fee as engineering consultant to Allis-Chalmers.
In 1949 he moved to Pine Bluff, Ark. , where the company of Ben Pearson began to make his machines. Two years later he set up the John Rust Foundation as a successor to the World Foundation. Rust continued to improve his cotton picker (as did his brother Mack, by then living in Coalinga, Calif. ) until he died, in Pine Bluff.
John Daniel Rust invented the first practical spindle cotton picker in the late 1930s. He was the founder of the Rust Cotton Picker Company and nonprofit organization "John Rust Foundation". At least thirty-six patents had been granted him by the time of his death. By 1957 the J. I. Case and the Massey-Ferguson companies were both manufacturing Rust machines. It was estimated in 1965 that 250, 000 seasonal cotton pickers had been displaced by picking machines.
Rust was married to Fay Pinkston. A brief marriage was ended in divorce. They had one daughter. On December 1, 1933, Rust married Thelma Ford.
