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THE ROMANCE OF RUBBER
EDITED BY JOHN MARTIN
EDITOR OF JOHN MARTIN'S BOOK THE CHILD'S MAGAZINE
PUBLISHED BY UNITED STATES RUBBER COMPANY
CONTENTS
1 THE DISCOVERY
2 CHARLES GOODYEAR
3 THE HEVEA TREE
4 WICKHAM'S IDEA
5 PLANTATION DEVELOPMENT
6 PLANTATION LIFE
7 HARVESTING THE RUBBER
8 A LAST WORD
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"[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 pronounced Hee'-vee-uh. Caoutchouc is
pronounced koo'-chook.
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.