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 History of rubber

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PaulRyckier
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PaulRyckier

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PostSubject: History of rubber   History of rubber EmptyThu 30 Apr 2015, 21:04

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Vizzer
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Vizzer

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PostSubject: Re: History of rubber   History of rubber EmptyThu 15 Jun 2017, 22:27

Quote :
In 1876, the British smuggled out rubber-tree seeds from Amazonia to the Botanical Gardens in London.

A popular myth which is so often repeated. At best it's a half truth. Exporting rubber seeds from the Brazilian Empire was not illegal. Nor has it ever been illegal in Brazil either before or since. It is possible that Henry Wickham took the seeds from private property without permission (i.e. stole them) but even that's not proven. It's a jolly good yarn though and no doubt Wickham was banking on the good copy. If the seeds themselves failed to make him rich then at least selling the story would provide some earnings.
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Meles meles
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Meles meles

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PostSubject: Re: History of rubber   History of rubber EmptyFri 16 Jun 2017, 10:50

Vizzer wrote:
Exporting rubber seeds from the Brazilian Empire was not illegal. Nor has it ever been illegal in Brazil either before or since.

Even so I wonder, had the Brazilian authorities been aware that the whole intention was to break the lucrative Brazilian monopoly of rubber, would they not have taken some action to try and stop Wickham. That said it is difficult to see how he managed to obtain the 70,000 seeds, (estimated, with their packing and crates, to have weighed at least a ton) without attracting some attention. The rubber plants in Brazil were not in managed plantations but as wild trees often widely spaced amongst other forest trees, and the ripe seeds do not fall but are jettisoned over a wide area when the seed pod splits. Accordingly Wickham must have put word out to numerous local communities throughout the region that he would buy up any seeds people could gather ... he certainly didn't collect them himself.

The Director of the Botanic Gardens in Singapore, Henry Ridley, and the person who more than any other worked to develop rubber plantations in Malaysia, said of Wickham, “I looked on him as a failed planter who was lucky in that for merely travelling home with a lot of seeds had received a knighthood and enough money to live comfortably in his old age…..He ordered natives to bring him in the seeds and to pack them in crates and put them on board ship. One cannot help feeling he was jolly well paid for a little job. He was no agriculturalist, he knew nothing about rubber and cared not for it…. As for his abilities in planting I should say he had none”.

PS
I recall from when I was studying materials science that the same active chemical in the latex of rubber trees, polyisoprene, also occurs in the milky latex of lettuces and dandelions. In WW2, Germany, cut off from most supplies of rubber in SE Asia, put a lot of effort into producing rubber from ordinary dandelions, but it wasn't feasible. However I now see (2013) that a pilot plant is up and running: Science Daily - Making rubber from dandelion juice


Last edited by Meles meles on Fri 16 Jun 2017, 13:14; edited 1 time in total
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Triceratops
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Triceratops

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PostSubject: Re: History of rubber   History of rubber EmptyFri 16 Jun 2017, 13:08

There is an article here about the production of synthetic rubber in WW2:

Synthetic Rubber

"President Franklin D. Roosevelt was well aware of U.S. vulnerability because of its dependence on threatened supplies of natural rubber, and in June 1940, he formed the Rubber Reserve Company (RRC). The RRC set objectives for stockpiling rubber, conserving the use of rubber in tires by setting speed limits, and collecting scrap rubber for reclamation.

The onset of World War II cut off U.S. access to 90 percent of the natural rubber supply. At this time, the United States had a stockpile of about one million tons of natural rubber, a consumption rate of about 600,000 tons per year, and no commercial process to produce a general purpose synthetic rubber. Conserving, reclaiming, and stockpiling activities could not fill the gap in rubber consumption.

After the loss of the natural rubber supply, the RRC called for an annual production of 400,000 tons of general purpose synthetic rubber to be manufactured by the four large rubber companies. On December 19, 1941, Jersey Standard, Firestone, Goodrich, Goodyear, and United States Rubber Company signed a patent and information sharing agreement under the auspices of the RRC."
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Vizzer
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Vizzer

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PostSubject: Re: History of rubber   History of rubber EmptyThu 27 Apr 2023, 20:48

It is remarkable by just how much Brazil lost market share in the rubber business. When Japan invaded South-East Asia in 1941, they took control of what by then was already 90% of the world’s natural rubber plantations. Even today Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma and the Philippines still account for 80% of global rubber production. Brazil, on the other hand, doesn’t even make the top 10 of rubber producing countries today, trailing behind the likes of Guatemala and the Ivory Coast. Other formerly significant players such as Sri Lanka and Liberia are even further down the league table.

With regard to dandelion rubber and other forms of rubber not reliant upon the tropical rubber tree (hevea brasiliensis), then this interesting article from the New York Botanical Garden shows how in the 1920s American inventor Thomas Edison with support from Henry Ford (automobile manufacturer) and Harvey Firestone (rubber tire maker) sought to produce rubber from the latex of goldenrods (solidago):
    
In Search of Thomas Edison's Botanical Treasures
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Meles meles
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Meles meles

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PostSubject: Re: History of rubber   History of rubber EmptySat 13 May 2023, 18:49

The history of rubber is surely not just about the cultivation of rubber trees and their successful transplantation to Asia, but must also be about the technical development of rubber into a substance of practical use and global significance. As with so many technological discoveries and advancements, getting natural rubber from being a curiosity to a useful material did not occur in isolation of other cultural, societal, scientific and industrial developments. 

Initially when it was first brought back from the Americas by the Spanish, rubber was merely of scientific interest and it was some years later in 1770 that the British scientist Joseph Priestley first remarked on its usefulness for rubbing pencil marks from paper; and so the popular English term rubber was coined. But besides erasing draughtsmen's errors it was of very limited use beyond making bouncy balls. Then in 1819 a scotsman, Charles Macintosh, who ran a cloth-dying business in Glasgow, approached his local gas works looking to obtain cheap naptha, a liquid component in the coal tar waste from producing coal gas, and which with the rest of the coal tar was simply dumped by the ton, typically in land fill or into rivers. Similar dumping was going on wherever the new gas-producing plants were in operation. Macintosh thought liquid naptha distilled from the coal tar could be used as a cleaner for his dying machines and since it was being thrown away he hoped to get it cheaply. He started using naptha as a cleaner in about 1820 and soon accidentally noticed that it would dissolve rubber (this had been observed in 1799 by Giovanni Fabbroni but the Italian scientist saw no practcal use for this). However since Macintosh was already in the cloth-dying business he immediately realised that dissolving rubber into naptha enabled it to be used much like a dye in the clothing business. By spreading a thin layer of rubber/naptha solution between two sheets of cotton he renderd the composite material completely waterproof but still flexible, and it also avoided the surface stickiness of the rubber. In 1823 he obtained a patent naming the process after himself and within a year had set up in partnership with a Manchester cotton mill to manufacture rubberised waterproof cloth.

Unknown to him at the time an ex-coachbuilder, Thomas Hancock, was also experimenting with methods to make rubber into large thin sheets, possibly as a way to replace leather in making the foldable canopies for cabriolet-type carriages. Whatever his reason he was already in business in London manufacturing small items in rubber. He bought the material in 'bottles', the shape in which it arrived from South America and so called because the latex from a tapped tree was allowed to flow into a glass bottle, which, when the contents had hardened was broken open to extract the solid bottle-shaped mass of rubber. Hancock had devised a method to then cut these lumps of solid rubber into strips which when warmed would stick together. He had patented this process in 1820 and used it to manufacture gloves, braces, stockings, belts, garters, the soles of shoes and other small items. These articles had caught on immediately they appeared on the market, but this left him struggling to get enough rubber to meet demand, albeit that after he had cut each 'bottle' into strips he was left with a lot of odd-shaped ends that he could not use. Eventually he developed a 'masticator', a box with a roller inside it on which were teeth that shredded the rubber off-cuts into small pieces which when heated could be pressed together into a solid block and once more be cut into strips.

In 1825 Macintosh and Hancock began collaborating in rubber technology. Macintosh still focussed on products made from rubberised cloth, making waterproof clothing including the now familiar raincoat that bears his name, but also items such as water hoses, air mattresses, boat covers and life-preservers. All these were extensively used on the Franklin expedition to the Arctic in 1824 and the resulting publicity gave a great boost to his business. Hancock meanwhile, his mascerating process now improved by partially dissolving the rubber scraps in naptha, was able to manufacture increasing large items so that his rubber was soon being used for printing rollers, shock absorbers for railway carriages and solid tyres for small vehicles. From then on the growth in the rubber industry was phenomenal. From a total of 23 tons imported in 1830 the amount of rubber imported to Britain rose to over 500 tons in the 1851 and then to just short of 2000 tons in 1861.
 
Macintosh’s and Hancock’s efforts had largely resolved the initial problems of handling the raw material but there remained some fundamental obstacles to the full exploitation of natural rubber: it softened with heat and hardened with cold; it was also tacky to the touch, odorous and perishable. These weaknesses were removed by the invention of vulcanization independently by Charles Goodyear in the USA and by Hancock in Britain, with both men filing patents in their respective countries within three weeks of each other in 1843. Blending the rubber with sulphur and then heat-treating ("curing") it, created a product with greater strength, impressive durability and much improved stability against temperature changes. Vulcanising the rubber improved the life and performance of items where rubber was already being used and also immediately opened it up for new applications, such as in the seals and gaskets on steam engines, and for water and air pumps, just at the time when such technolgy was literally advancing at speed across the country's growing railway network and expanding sea lanes.

Vulcanisation also arrived just in time for the advent of the bicycle, the new, inexpensive and immediately popular means of personal transport, which even with solid rubber tyres was made considerably more comfortable than the very first models had been with their iron-rimmed wheels. Cyclists' comfort was further improved by scotsman John Boyd Dunlop's 1887 invention of the pneumatic rubber tyre. Strictly the idea of the pneumatic tyre had been patented in 1847 by yet another scot, Robert William Thomson, but at the time rubber technology, even with the newly discovered method of vulcanisation, hadn't been quite up to the task. Of course within just a few years of Dunlop's reinvention of pneumatic tyre they were being mass produced world-wide, not only for bicycles but for automobiles, and hence in the 20th century the consumption of rubber has soared and its supply a matter of national strategic importance.

PS 

As a side note it is also worth noting that back in 1853 Hancock had written to Kew Botanical Gardens to get them to try and obtain seeds or seedlings of rubber plants from South America with a view to setting up rubber plantations in the Far East. At just this time the authorities in Kew were preparing two expeditions to go to South America with a view to obtaining seeds from another plant which they intended to raise seedlings and thence establish plantations in Asia. This plant was not rubber but cinchona, the bark of which tree contains quinine, which was used to treat the malaria that was ravaging the armies and administrators in British India. One of the 1859 expeditions successfully returned with seeds that were duly raised at Kew but unfortunately the amount of quinine they produced was low. Nevertheless this limited success, combined with Hancock's lobbying, likely paved the way for Kew's support of Henry Wickham's rubber seed collecting in the 1870s, that eventually led to the succesful cultivation of rubber in SE Asia and the subsequent end of Brazil's monoply on rubber supply.
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