Book: The Romance of Rubber
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John Martin (Ed.) >> The Romance of Rubber
Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE ROMANCE OF RUBBER
EDITED BY JOHN MARTIN
EDITOR OF JOHN MARTIN'S BOOK THE CHILD'S MAGAZINE
PUBLISHED 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 balls given him by these Indian boys. He learned
that the balls were made from the hardened juice of a tree.
The little boys and girls of Spain were used to playing with balls
made of rags or wool, so you may imagine how these bouncing balls
of the Indians must have pleased them. But the men who sent out
this second expedition gave the balls 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"
[Footnote: Hevea is pronounced Hee'-vee-uh. Caoutchouc is
pronounced koo'-chook.] "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.
It was not long afterwards that Lisbon began to import some of
these crudely fashioned 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
shillings, 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 ships as ballast in the form of crude lumps and balls.
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
molasses and butter. 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 passion 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.
Finally, in 1839, when he was on the point of giving up in
despair, he accidentally came upon the solution. He was
experimenting in his kitchen, a place which, through lack of
funds, he was often forced to use as a laboratory. Part of a
mixture of rubber, sulphur and other chemicals, with which he was
working, happened to drop on the top of the stove. It lay there
sizzling and charring until the odor of the burning rubber called
his attention to it. As he stooped to scrape it off the stove he
gave a start of wonder as he noted that a change had come over the
rubber during its brief contact with the stove.
To his surprise the mixture had not melted, but had flattened out
in the shape of a silver dollar. When it had cooled enough to be
handled, he found that it bent and stretched easily, without
cracking or breaking, and that it always snapped back to its
original shape. Strangest of all, it was no longer sticky.
Apparently half the problem was solved. Whether his new mixture
would stand the cold he had yet to find out, so he nailed it on
the outside of the door and went to bed. Probably he slept but
little and was up early. At any rate he found the rubber
unaffected by the cold.
Then he knew that he had made a real discovery and he named the
process "vulcanizing" after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.
"Vulcanizing" means mixing pure rubber with certain chemicals and
then applying heat. On this process, which is by no means simple,
the great rubber business of the world has been established.
Practically everything made of rubber, or of which rubber is a
part, has to go through the vulcanizing process, whether it is a
pair of Keds, a tire, a fruit jar ring, or a doormat.
So many people had been deceived by previous rubber ventures that
Goodyear had great trouble in finding anyone with enough faith to
invest money in his discovery. It was some time before he was able
to take out the first of the more than sixty patents which he was
granted during his lifetime for applying his process to various
uses. Under these patents he licensed several factories to use the
process in the manufacture of rubber goods, but required them to
stamp all goods with the words "Goodyear patent." Scores of
companies have since used the name Goodyear, but the only
factories that he licensed which are now in existence are parts of
the United States Rubber Company.
Goodyear often had to defend his patents in court. In the most
famous of these suits, he was defended by Daniel Webster and
opposed by Rufus Choate, so that we see interwoven in the story of
rubber the names of two of the greatest statesmen this country has
produced.
CHAPTER 3
THE HEVEA TREE
For the very first of the rubber story we may thank a little wood-
boring beetle, and the way nature has of helping her children to
protect themselves.
The thistle of the meadow is as safe from hungry cattle as though
fenced in by barbed wire. A cow must be starving that would care
to flavor her luncheon with the needles that the thistle bears.
The common skunk cabbage would make a tempting meal for her after
a winter of dry feeding, had not Nature given it an odor that
disgusts even a spring-time appetite. The milkweed welcomes the
bees and flies that help to distribute her pollen where she wants
it spread, but she has her own way of punishing the useless
thieves that trespass up her stalk. Wherever the hooks of an
insect's feet pierce her tender skin, she pours out a milky juice
to entangle its feet and body, and it is a lucky bug that succeeds
in escaping before this juice hardens, and holds him a prisoner
condemned to die.
All over the world there are plants with the same ability that the
milkweed has, but it is especially true of certain trees and vines
of the tropics. As soon as the little beetle begins to bore into
the bark of one of these trees, there pours out a sticky, milky
fluid that kills the insect at once. If this were all, the wound
would remain open, ready for the next robber who came along. In
order that the break may be healed, a cement is necessary, but not
a hard, unyielding one, for that would crumble away with the
motion of the tree in the wind.
So with Mother Nature's perfection in doing things, the very plant
juice that has done duty as a poison is hardened into an elastic
stopper. with the result that, no matter how far the tree may sway
and tug at the wound, the filling gives and stretches, true to the
task it has to perform.
This was the juice the crafty savage induced the tree to give up.
Wherever the bark was cut, the fluid poured forth to heal the
break and hardened like blood on a cut finger. The native caught
it while it was still soft and applied it to his simple needs.
This juice is not the sap of the rubber tree. Sap, which is the
life-blood of the tree, flows through the wood, but the juice we
are describing is contained in the inner bark, a thin layer
directly below the outer bark.
Scientific men call this juice latex. It is like milk in three
ways: it is white, it contains tiny particles that rise to the top
like cream, and it spoils quickly.
The particles in cow's milk are full of fats which make it good
for us to drink. But a rubber tree's milk has tiny atoms of rubber
and resin and other things, and it took time to discover which of
the vines and trees was the prize milker of the tropics and gave
the largest amount of pure rubber. Finally, the Hevea, the very
tree the Frenchman wrote about, proved to be the best, and,
although by no means the only rubber tree of commercial value, it
is acknowledged the greatest of rubber trees.
The Hevea tree grows sixty feet tall, and when full grown is eight
or ten feet around. It rises as straight as an elm, with high
branching limbs and long, smooth oval leaves. Sprays of pale
flowers blossom upon it in August, followed in a few months by
pods containing three speckled seeds which look like smooth,
slightly flattened nutmegs. When the seeds are ready to drop the
outer covering of the pod bursts with a loud report, the seeds
shooting in all directions.
This is Nature's clever scheme to spread the Hevea family. The
tree grows wild in the hot, damp forests of the Amazon valley and
in other parts of South America that have a similar climate. The
ideal climate for the rubber tree is one which is uniform all the
year round, from eighty-nine to ninety-four degrees at noon, and
riot lower than seventy degrees at night. The Amazon country has a
rainy season which lasts half the year, though the other season is
by no means a dry one, and so for half the time the jungles are
flooded.
These rubber storehouses had been growing for thousands of years
in the Amazon jungle with their wealth securely sealed up in their
bark, the peck of a bird, the boring of a beetle, or the scratch
of a climbing animal being the only draft upon their treasure. The
trees around the mouth of the river supplied whatever was needed
for the little manufacturing that was at first done. But the
discovery that made a universal use for rubber changed all this.
Brazil was surprised to find what great treasure her forests
contained. Large rubber areas were found a thousand miles up the
river and she began in a serious way to develop a large crude
rubber business.
Less than twenty years ago Brazil produced practically all the
rubber used in the world. But to-day she furnishes less than one-
tenth of the world's supply. How Brazil, possessing in her vast
forests millions of rubber trees of the finest quality, has been
forced by unfavorable conditions to permit the Far East to sweep
from her in this short time the crude rubber supremacy of the
world is one of the most unusual chapters in modern industrial
history.
CHAPTER 4
WICKHAM'S IDEA
The story of the success of the East Indies in wresting the crude
rubber supremacy from Brazil, begins with an Englishman named
Wickham, who might be called the father of plantation rubber.
Wickham, who had spent some years in South America, understood the
difficulties of gathering rubber in the jungles. He believed that
if rubber could be cultivated it might prove a good crop on the
coffee plantations in India which a blight had recently rendered
valueless for coffee. What a strange fact it is that this blight
gave Brazil a chance to go into coffee growing, and that while
Brazil was losing the rubber supremacy to the Far East, the Far
East at about the same time was surrendering the leadership in
coffee to Brazil. The latter now holds first place in coffee
growing as firmly as does the Far East in rubber growing.
Wickham saw that there were difficulties that would prevent the
gathering of wild rubber from keeping pace with the growing
demand. Although millions of rubber trees still stood untouched in
the Brazilian forests, only those trees near the river banks could
be tapped because of the impossibility of getting the rubber out
of the dense vegetation. Life in the jungle was dangerous and
lonely, and therefore rubber gatherers were not easy to find. They
were compelled to work far from their families and friends, and in
constant danger from wild beasts, reptiles and death-bearing
fevers. It is no wonder that rubber obtained in this way came to
be known as "wild rubber." Moreover, transporting the crude
product through the jungles was hard and expensive and the rubber
obtained under these conditions was not always so clean or high in
quality as might be wished.
"If rubber trees grow from the seeds which nature scatters in the
jungle," said Wickham to himself, "why should they not grow from
seeds put into the ground by hand?"
"If rubber trees could be raised from seed, they could be planted
in the open in rows where they could easily be tended and tapped,
and the rubber gathered quickly and safely. Instead of having to
brave the dangerous jungles, men could plant and cultivate rubber
in spots of their own choosing so long as they chose places where
the climate was right."
For many years people only laughed at Wickham's great idea, but
like Goodyear he had faith enough to persevere. While in Brazil he
planted some rubber seeds to see what would happen. The seeds DID
grow, and the book which Wickham wrote about his idea and his
experiments finally came into the hands of Sir Joseph Hooker, the
Director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, near London. So
interested did he become that he called Wickham's plan to the
attention of the Government of India, and finally Wickham was
commissioned to take a cargo of rubber seeds to England, so that
his idea might be tried out.
This commission was more difficult than one might think, and all
of Wickham's faith and perseverance were needed to carry it out.
Indeed for a time it seemed hopeless, principally because the
seeds so quickly dry up and lose their vitality that they must be
planted very soon after being gathered.
But Wickham watched his opportunity, and finally he was able to
charter a ship in the name of the Indian Government. About a third
of the way up the Amazon River he placed in her hold several
thousand carefully packed seeds of the Hevea Braziliensis, or
rubber tree. Let Wickham, himself, tell how he surmounted the next
difficulty:
"We were bound to call in at the city of Para as the port of
entry, in order to obtain clearance papers for the ship before we
could go to sea. Any delay would have rendered my precious freight
quite valueless and useless. But again fortune favored. I had a
'friend at court' in the person of Consul Green, who went himself
with me to call on the proper official, and supported me as I
presented to His Excellency 'my difficulty and anxiety, being in
charge of, and having on board a ship anchored out in the stream,
exceedingly delicate botanical specimens, especially designated
for delivery to Her Britannic Majesty's own Royal Garden of Kew.
Even while doing myself the honor of thus calling on His
Excellency, I had given orders to the captain of the ship to keep
up steam, having ventured to trust His Excellency would see his
way clear to furnishing me with immediate dispatch. An interview
most polite, full of mutual compliments in the best Portuguese
manner, enabled us to get under way as soon as the captain had got
the dinghy hauled aboard."
Can you imagine Wickham's sigh of relief as his vessel, with its
freight of perishable treasure, steamed out of port, and began the
long journey to England?
CHAPTER 5
PLANTATION DEVELOPMENT
The transporting of the rubber seeds from the Brazilian forests to
England was only the first step in Wickham's project. The real
test was still to come. The seeds were planted in the famous
Botanical Gardens of Kew, and on August 12, 1876, the several
thousand seedlings which had been raised from them were packed in
special cases and shipped to Ceylon on the other side of the globe
for the final and most important stage of the experiment.
How long the next five years must have seemed to the anxious
Wickham, for it was that long before the first rubber tree
flowered in the gardens at Heneratgoda, sixteen miles from
Colombo, where the trees had finally been planted. In this year,
1881, experiments in tapping began, and it was plain that
Wickham's dream was to be realized.
From these few trees, so carefully tended in their youth, has
sprung the whole rubber industry of Ceylon and the Far East.
Wickham must indeed have been proud to see the plantations
spreading from Ceylon to Malaya, where rubber was eagerly taken up
by planters who were despairing of ever making a living out of
coffee, and later to Sumatra and Java and Borneo. To-day rubber
plantations cover an area of over 3,000,000 acres, with a yearly
output of almost 360,000 tons, or about ten times the average
yearly output of "wild rubber."
There is a curious coincidence in the fact that Wickham got his
idea about planting rubber trees in India at about the same time
that men in America began to experiment with the horseless
carriage. You may never have stopped to think of it, but
mechanical experts say that without rubber pneumatic tires,
automobiles could never have become the fine, swift vehicles they
are. It was a wonderful thing that when in the early part of this
century the automobile industry suddenly burst forth with a demand
for rubber so great that Brazil could never have hoped to supply
it, there was found ready in the Far East, as a result of the
planting that had been done there, a supply that took care of the
sudden emergency.
A little more than ten years ago American business men began to
take an interest in the rubber plantations. They have shown
characteristic energy in the field, and the greatest single rubber
plantation in the world is owned by an American company, the
United States Rubber Company. This plantation is on the island of
Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, one of the best governed
colonies in the East. On this island is an orchard of rubber
trees, as beautifully laid out and as well cared for as any
orchard of fruit trees in our own country. For seventy square
miles, an area as large as the District of Columbia, the orderly
ranks of trees fill the gently rolling landscape, every inch of
which is weeded as carefully as a garden. It takes twenty thousand
employees to care for the trees, which number more than 5,000,000.
On this plantation the science of growing rubber trees has been
brought to a perfection known nowhere else in the world. Groups of
botanists, chemists and arboriculturists study constantly tree
diseases, methods of increasing the yield, and the other problems
of growing fine trees that will produce high grade rubber. Here,
by experiment and inspection, the secrets of the rubber tree are
being brought to light, so much so that growers look to this
plantation for leadership in methods of rubber culture. This great
project so far from American soil and in a field so new gives a
thrill of pride to the Americans visiting Sumatra on their way
around the world.
CHAPTER 6
PLANTATION LIFE
The moist but very hot climate which rubber trees require is found
only in a zone around the world between the parallels of latitude
thirty degrees north to thirty degrees south of the equator.
Within this zone there have been found more than 350 rubber
bearing trees, shrubs and vines. For this reason this zone is
called the Rubber Belt. As most of the rubber used commercially is
gathered from trees growing within a zone extending from ten
degrees north to ten degrees south of the equator, this latter
zone is sometimes called the Inner Rubber Belt.
If you will trace this belt on a map of the world you will see
that it includes the Amazon region which produces more than three-
quarters of the wild rubber used in manufacturing. Most of South
America's wild rubber is obtained from Brazil, the remainder from
Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela. Now continue the belt across the
Atlantic Ocean to Africa, where you will strike the Belgian Congo
which produces a small quantity of wild rubber. Partly owing to
the careless manner of gathering and partly to the fact that it is
not originally of as good quality as Brazilian rubber, Congo
rubber is not as valuable for manufacturing as Brazilian. Then
complete the circle by following the belt across the Indian Ocean
to Ceylon and the East Indies which contain the great rubber
plantations where most of the rubber used to-day comes from.
To establish a rubber plantation requires very careful planning.
The choice of a site is of first importance, for the planter must
find a locality having a moist climate with an evenly distributed
rain-fall where the temperature throughout the year does not fall
below seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and where there is protection
from the wind. There must also be, of course, access to a steady
labor supply and a convenient shipping port. As the proper climate
is a tropical one, there is usually dense jungle to be cleared
away. Immense trees and thick bushes, rank straggling weeds and
vines form an almost impenetrable jungle. To turn such a place
into a garden spot means a genuine battle against jungle
conditions. But gradually trees, shrubs and undergrowth are torn
out and burned, laying bare the rich soil ready for the plow of
the planter.