Back in the 1960s I was in Monrovia, Liberia and found myself waiting for equipment to arrive from the United States to finish a project I was working on. Since I had a few days of slack time, I visited A Firestone Rubber Plantation just a few miles outside of Monrovia. It was the first time I’d ever seen rubber trees and the handful of Americans that were in charge of the operations hadn’t seen anyone from “home,” for quite some time so I was welcomed with open arms and given a very extensive, personalized tour of the facility.
The history of rubber is fascinating. Like a lot of things, the stories of how rubber was discovered vary depending on who is telling the story. One story tells of a Mayas Indian woman who was walking through the rain forest gathering edibles when she came across a crying tree. She took a sample of the tears back to the tribe’s chief who found the latex substance unique.
But I like the story that Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover rubber. When he was in Haiti, he noticed some boys playing with a rubber ball. The local people took Columbus into the forest and showed him how, when they cut the bark of certain trees, a milky white liquid bled from the cut. When the material (latex) dried, it was solid and spongy. Besides the balls the kids were playing with, the Indians also made waterproof shoes and bottles from the strong substance. But if Columbus brought some back with him to Spain, he never mentioned it.
In the 1730s, two French scientists made an official report to the French Academy of Sciences on rubber’s characteristics and properties. After that, Europeans were curious enough to mount expeditions to the Amazon to try to find some more.
In 1770, an English chemist discovered that the substance rubbed out marks from a pencil — that marked the discovery of what the English came to call a “rubber,” and what Americans call an “eraser.” But Rubber remained nothing more than a curiosity because of the way it reacted to the elements — cold made it extremely brittle, and heat made it sticky.
All this changed in 1839 when American inventor Charles Goodyear accidentally spilled a mixture of rubber and sulfur onto a hot stove. Now the rubber stayed firm, whether it was hot or cold. This process of mixing and heating rubber was called vulcanization, after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.The “miracle” of vulcanization made rubber a hot commodity. At first, almost all the latex was harvested in the Amazon. Brazilian merchants were making a fortune, while the rest of the entrepreneurial world watched them.
This went on until 1876, when an English botanist, Sir Henry Wickham, brought some back to England. He told Brazilian customs officials that the 70,000 rubber tree seeds he was bring to England were botanical specimens for the royal plant collection, and fortunately they (were dumb enough?) believed him.
But when the the rubber tree seedlings were old enough, the English government sent them to Ceylon and Malaya, where they were plunked into the ground. By the turn of the 19th century, large rubber plantations in the Pacific Rim supplied most of the world’s natural rubber.
During World War I, when the allied blockage prevented Germany from getting the rubber it needed for tires, German scientists set to work on an artificial substitute. By the time World War II broke out, rubber was even more strategically important, but good synthetics were still prohibitively expensive. When Japan seized control of most of the rubber-producing islands of the Pacific Rim, effectively cutting off the U.S. supply, the search for synthetics was fast and furious. Within a few years, good synthetics made from petroleum were in wide use. Today, it’s hard to find the real thing.
— 30 —