âWild Rubberâ and Early Industry
No one ever used the term âWild Rubberâ until the development of rubber plantations at the end of the nineteenth century. Several trees and other plants that bore harvestable latex grew âin the wild,â long before they were cultivated on plantations. The resultant rubber varied widely in both quality and cost of production, depending on the source. Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa were well aware of the elastic quality of the âlatexâ that oozed out of certain plants for many years before the arrival of Europeans. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Columbus and other Europeans âdiscoveredâ rubber, much as they âdiscoveredâ so much of the flora of the Western Hemisphere and sub-Saharan Africa: indigenous people introduced it to them.
For centuries, Mesoamerican societies had harvested latex from what later became known as Castilla elastica, a tall tree found in what are today southern Mexico and Central America. Latexâs most important use, as described by the Spanish, was in fashioning balls for ritual games. Columbus himself saw what we would call a rubber ball, so unusual for a European at the time that there was no Latin or Spanish word to describe the substance of which the ball was made. At Moctezuma IIâs court in Tenochtitlan (todayâs Mexico City), Spanish conquistadors watched the complex game, especially marveling at the bouncing ball, so much so that they hauled both players and balls all the way back to Spain to serve as live exhibits for the Spanish court.
There does not appear to have been significant ongoing trade in latex or rubber objects between the Mexica and the Incas or other groups on the South American continent, so it is likely that the inhabitants of the Amazon river basin learned independently of Central American peoples how to tap what Europeans later dubbed rubber trees, including Hevea brasiliensis, or simply hevea. Tupi-speaking Indians in what is now Brazil called the tree cahuchu, literally âwood that weeps,â variants of which became the word for ârubberâ in several European languages: caucho in Spanish, caoutchouc in French, and Kautschuk in German. Amazonians fashioned coagulated latex into a series of products, notably boots, which were obviously very useful in the tropical rainforest where the cahuchu tree thrived. Little by little, over the next two centuries Europeans on scientific expeditions learned more about the mysterious substance, seeing the actual latex-bearing trees, how they were tapped, and how Indians transformed the latex into objects. The Frenchman who first described a rubber tree, Charles Marie de la Condamine, had led an expedition to the equator in order to conduct measurements and verify the shape of the globe, gathering and describing specimens of plants and animals along the way. While in South America, he saw a rubber tree tapped and named the whitish sap-like substance âlatexâ (Latin for liquid or liqueur) and the smoke-cured result caoutchouc.
Although we generally associate the desire to find, name, and control global fauna and flora with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, it had a much longer history. As early as the fifteenth century, Europeans gathered objects, transported them back to Europe, and tried to figure out commercial uses. The âage of discoveryâ was fundamentally about profits. Initially, rubber seemed much less profitable than other âdiscoveriesâ such as cocoa, tobacco, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, or cinchona bark (from which the anti-malarial drug quinine could be produced, which in turn enabled yet more imperial expansion). However fascinating rubber might have been, well into the eighteenth century the substance was not an industrial commodity. At the end of the century the Montgolfier brothers in France used a sort of rubber sealant on their hot air balloons, and the British inventor Joseph Priestley used a nub of the substance to erase or ârub outâ pencil marks, naming it âIndia Rubber,â a designation that eventually became simply ârubber.â
In the nineteenth century, rubber, a product of empire, became a product of industry. In the 1820s, the British chemist Charles Macintosh used coal tar naphtha to dissolve solid rubber (and then apply it to canvas to make effective raincoats, henceforth called âMacintoshesâ). When combined with Briton Thomas Hancockâs patented âmasticator,â which could chew up solid balls of cured rubber shipped from South America (later, plantations would produce crepe sheets), the manufacture of rubber products became possible outside rubber-growing regions. Up to this point, the latex had generally been smoke-cured into objects, such as boots or balls, on site in South America, then shipped to Europe or North America. Now, however, solid balls of smoked rubber could be broken down, easily dissolved, and made into objects in the Northern Hemisphere. Like cotton manufacture, which the British empire largely removed from India over time and installed in Britain, the base of rubber manufacture would similarly move from South America to Europe and the United States.
By the late 1830s, American inventor Charles Goodyear had found that the addition of sulfur to heated masticated rubber would keep the resultant rubber products from melting in the heat and cracking in the cold. In traditional histories of the Industrial Revolution, which inevitably focus on Britain, much space is devoted to explaining the strength of the British patent system. Yet, much like British free trade (which was not always free outside Europe, notably in nineteenth-century India and China), the British patent system worked well for British subjects and less well for others. Goodyear got a US patent for the process he had discovered, which he named vulcanization after the Roman god of fire. However, the British did not recognize US patents, and Hancock freely patented the same process in Britain before Goodyear did so. (As a result, Goodyear never made much money from his patent, even though many small nineteenth-century rubber companies paid homage by using Goodyear in their companiesâ names; tellingly, the eventually huge and profitable American tire firm Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company did not belong to Charles Goodyear or his heirs.)
In 1851 in London, at the first worldâs fair, the Crystal Palace Exhibition, rubber manufacturers exhibited a host of rubber goods in an effort to build a market. There Thomas Hancock and other British manufacturers showed toys, Macintosh cloaks, capes, pillows, cushions, life preservers, model pontoons, and assorted other rubber products. Charles Goodyear set up a large stand with myriad articles called âGoodyearâs Vulcanite Court.â He displayed walls, furniture, jewelry, household goods, and medical instruments of ebonite (hardened rubber later used for telephone casing and other products before the development of modern plastics). For a comparable rubber exhibit at the first international exposition in Paris in 1855, Goodyear received the cross of the Legion of Honor from French Emperor Napoleon III.
Less noticed at the time were the industrialâas opposed to what we today would call the consumerâuses of rubber. In the steam engines that powered the factories that built weapons, the steamships that carried European troops and indigenous laborers back and forth across empires, and the railway engines that moved men, women, and material in Europe and increasingly in European colonies, rubber was the raw material for a host of industrial parts. Washers, gaskets, buffer and bearing springs, rolling pistons, plug valves, hoses, belts, motor mounts, and other unseen rubber parts became key components of both advanced industry and the imperialism i...
