A decorticator (from Latin: cortex, bark) is a machine for stripping the skin, bark, or rind off nuts, wood, plant stalks, grain, etc., in preparation for further processing.
The year was 1861, the place Bologna, Italy. A machine called a “scavezzatrice,” a hemp decorticator, was first invented by a farmer named Bernagozzi. The “scavezzatrice” faded in the 1950s because of competition from synthetic materials and from other more profitable crops. An example of a working hemp decorticator from 1890, manufactured in Germany, is still preserved in a museum in Bologna.
Suggestions have been made about the birth of this device, including that the first working hemp decorticator was invented in the United States in 1935,but truth is, probably hundreds of different decorticators have been developed since 1890. In 1916, there were already five different kinds of “machine brakes” for hemp in use in the United States, and still others in Europe.
One of the most talked about decorticators is the Schlichten model. George Schlichten’s machine was able to keep the alignment of the fibers in order and turned out a continuous sliver of hemp that was ready to be spun with existing machinery. The Decorticator separated the long hemp fibers from the pulpy celluloid center of the hemp stalks, dramatically reducing the exorbitant labor costs associated with cleaning and preparing hemp for further processing.
Born in Germany in 1862, George Schlichten put over $400,000 of his own money into developing the decorticator and needed to find a market where he could recoup some of that investment. In 1916, he took his first production of hemp sliver to the New York Market where it sold for a record price of $100 a ton more than any other fiber had previously. Experts had pronounced it even better than the Italian hemp.
The hemp decorticator’s performance caught the eye of one man, J. D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller owned a spinning mill and purchased Schlichten’s entire crop plus hired him to supervise spinning the unfamiliar fibers into yarn. The mill was so impressed that they tried to buy exclusive rights to the invention. Schlichten, however, he was not ready to sell out, especially not to Rockefeller.
In 1919, George Schlichten received a U.S. patent on his improvements of the decorticator for treating fiber bearing plants; but in the end, Schlichten failed to find investors for production of his decorticator and died as a broken man in 1923.
Schlichten did leave eight pages of drawings with his first patent and another page in his second and considered his work no secret. Almost everything that is known about Schlichten comes from a series of twenty-four letters once owned by Edward W. Scripps, but later donated to the Alden Library at Ohio University in Athens.
To this day, there are still companies who produce and sell new decorticators for different crops.
Click below to see some of the patent drawings of Schlichten’s decorticator:
1919: SCHLICHTEN’S DECORTICATOR
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