Part 1 (1/2)

The Romance of Rubber.

by United States Rubber Company.

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE

We have undertaken to print this booklet, telling you how rubber is grown, gathered, and then made useful, for this reason:

The United States Rubber Company, as the largest rubber manufacturer in the world, wants the coming generations of our country to have some understanding of the importance of rubber in our every day life.

We hope to interest and inform you. We believe the rubber industry will be better off if the future citizens of our country know more about it.

CHAPTER 1

THE DISCOVERY

If you were asked, ”What did Columbus discover in 1492?” you would have but one answer. But what he discovered on his second voyage is not quite so easy to say. He was looking for gold when he landed on the island of Hayti on that second trip. So his eyes were blind to the importance of a simple game which he saw being played with a ball that bounced by some half-naked Indian boys on the sand between the palm trees and the sea. Instead of the coveted gold, he took back to Europe, just as curiosities, some of the strange black b.a.l.l.s given him by these Indian boys. He learned that the b.a.l.l.s were made from the hardened juice of a tree.

The little boys and girls of Spain were used to playing with b.a.l.l.s made of rags or wool, so you may imagine how these bouncing b.a.l.l.s of the Indians must have pleased them. But the men who sent out this second expedition gave the b.a.l.l.s little thought and certainly no value. Since Columbus brought back no gold, he was thrown into prison for debt, and he never imagined that, four hundred years later, men would turn that strange, gummy tree juice into more gold than King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and all the princes of Europe ever dreamed of.

In the next century after Columbus's travels the Portuguese founded the colony of Brazil on the continent of South America.

Their settlements were near the coast and they did not begin to explore the great Amazon region for a hundred years or so. The journey down this great river--which Theodore Roosevelt took so many years later--was first made by a Portuguese missionary, who found the same kind of gummy tree juice as that of the West Indies. But the natives along the Amazon had discovered that besides being elastic it was waterproof, and they were making shoes that would keep out water. You can picture a native boy spilling some of this liquid on his foot, then covering it, as he might with a mud pie, and when it dried wiggling his toes to find that, he had the first and perhaps the best fitting gum shoe that ever was made.

Little by little samples of this new substance found their way to Europe. It was another hundred years before thoughtful men believed it worth while to investigate this gum. In 1731 the Paris Academy of Science sent some explorers to learn about it. One of these Frenchmen, La Condamine, wrote of a tree called ”Hevea”[1]

”There flows from this tree a liquor which hardens gradually and blackens in the air.” He found the people of Quito waterproofing cloth with it, and the Amazon Indians were making boots which, when blackened in smoke, looked like leather. Most interesting of all, they coated bottle-shaped moulds, and when the gum had hardened they would break the mould, shaking the pieces out of the neck, leaving an unbreakable bottle that would hold liquids.

[1] Hevea is p.r.o.nounced Hee'-vee-uh. Caoutchouc is p.r.o.nounced koo'-chook.

It was not long afterwards that Lisbon began to import some of these crudely fas.h.i.+oned articles, and it is said that in 1755 the King of Portugal sent to Brazil several pairs of his boots to be waterproofed. A few years later the Government of Para, Brazil, sent him a full suit of rubber clothes. For all that, this elastic gum was for the most part only a curiosity, and few people knew there was such a thing.

About the year 1770, a black, bouncing ball of caoutchouc, as the Indians called the gum, after many travels found its way to England, and Priestley, the man who gave us oxygen, learned that it would rub out pencil marks. Then and there he named it what you have probably guessed long before this: ”rub-ber.” Nearly every language except English uses in place of the word rubber some form of the native Word ”caoutchouc,” which means ”weeping tree.” After Priestley's discovery, a one-inch ”rubber” sold for three s.h.i.+llings, or about seventy-five cents, but artists were glad to pay even that price, because their work was made so much easier.

CHAPTER 2

CHARLES GOODYEAR

In 1800 Brazil was the only country manufacturing rubber articles, and her best market soon proved to be North America. Probably the first rubber this country saw was brought to New England in clipper s.h.i.+ps as ballast in the form of crude lumps and b.a.l.l.s.

Rubber shoes, water-bottles, powder-flasks, and tobacco-pouches found buyers in the American ports, but rubber shoes were most in demand.

Soon some Americans began to import raw rubber and to manufacture rubber goods of their own, and in the old world a Scotchman named Macintosh found a way of waterproofing cloth by spreading on it a thin coating of rubber dissolved in coal naphtha. Many people still refer to raincoats as mackintoshes. Rubber clothing shared favor with rubber shoes, but its popularity was short-lived for it did not wear well and was almost as sensitive to temperature as mola.s.ses and b.u.t.ter. The rubber shoes and coats get hard and stiff in winter and soft and sticky in summer. A man wearing a pair of rubber overalls who sat down too near a warm stove soon found that his overalls, his chair and himself were stuck fast together. The first rubber coats became so stiff in cold weather that when you took one off you could stand it up in the middle of the floor and leave it, for it would stand like a tent until the rubber thawed out, and when thawed it was almost as uncomfortable as is fly-paper to the fly.

One day Charles Goodyear, a Connecticut hardware merchant of an inventive turn of mind, went to a store to buy a life preserver.

He could find only imperfect ones, but they drew his attention to the study of rubber, and presently he was thinking of it by day and dreaming of it by night. Rubber became a pa.s.sion with him. He felt sure some way could be found to make it firm yet flexible regardless of temperature, and for ten years he experimented with different mixtures and processes, hoping to find the right one. So intent was he on his search that he found time for nothing else.

Due to neglect his business went to pieces and he became very poor.