I remember it clearly. As a newly arrived immigrant student from India I am at class at my university in the midwest. I ask someone to pass me a rubber. Everyone snickers. In India a rubber means eraser. In America it’s a condom. Lesson 101 in the culture gap.
I turned red in the face. But at that time I didn’t know rubber had a history far more tortuous than my awkward moment - one that connected Africa, Americas, Europe and Asia in a latex thread of marvelous discovery and rapacious greed.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
Vidya Rajan is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Delaware. And she is the author of Rubber - The Social and Natural History of an indispensable substance.
She says first off many plants produce rubber. But not all rubbers are created equal. Only some are of use to humans.
VR1: You have high quality rubber that comes from this plant called brasiliensis severe. The genus name brasiliensis because it's from Brazil and it's a it's considered the most high quality rubber.
The old central and south American civilizations had rubber. Christopher Columbus saw boys playing on the beaches of Hispaniola with a ball that bounced. The Olmecs, the Rubber People, even figured out a way to make rubber less brittle.
VR2: they found that certain juices there was the Ipomoea alba. It was the morning glory ine. It's a wine which is present in that area. And they found that adding the juice of this particular Ipomoea vine and stirring it made the rubber bouncy, but it also made it long lasting.
But the Europeans discovered that rubber was good for more than bouncing balls. It had waterproofing qualities. It could be made into tubes. And they didn’t need to use breadcrumbs to erase pencil marks anymore.
VR3: The erased quality was discovered, presumably by a man called Edward Nairne, who was an inventor. And then he discovered that it was good at rubbing out pencil lines. And so he started selling little blocks of this
But it still wasn't practical until they figured out adding sulphur made it more stable. Aka vulcanization. Then the rubber wars started heating up. Charles Goodyear in the USA and Thomas Hancock in Britain.
VR4: Vulcanization was a process that Thomas Hancock says he independently invented. And then here Charles Goodyear says, oh, no, I discovered it.
They sued each other. Both exhibited their products at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Goodyear had a rubber room.
VR5: he actually outfitted an entire room with Vulcanite. he had rubber, uh, syringes. He had ink pots. He had anything that you had a rubber book, a book of rubber made of rubber. He had everything you could think of.
This rivalry between the USA and Britain could have been a fun story except neither country grew rubber. Rubber grew in places like the Congo and Belgium’s King Leopold saw it as a quick way to get very very rich. His agents took over village after village.
VR6: He gave them a bolt of cloth. And he said, for a bolt of cloth, every year you sign over everything your tribe, your families, your your land.
VR7: People didn't want to be slaves. They would try to escape. They would press people into into servitude by taking their families hostage
Thousands died. Both in Africa and along the Amazon.
VR8: here were people being shot for fun, set on fire for fun. Anything. They would cut off hands. They would use women as sex slaves.
The rubber barons were robber barons, Meanwhile the Portuguese were trying to control the flow of rubbers so seedlings were smuggled out and sent to Asia. That’s why during World WartII the Japanese and the allies tried to control rubber because war needed rubber. Americans tried to conserve all the rubber they could find, a rubber project second only to the Manhattan Project.
VR9: Americans were all told they couldn't drive about 35 miles an hour, which to me is amazing.
VR10: And that was not to save gasoline that was to save rubber, prevent rubber from being eroded so that they could stockpile the rubber. .. And they won the war on the back of good husbandry of rubber.
Now we live in a world where we can’t do without rubber. But can the world bear more rubber plantations. And synthetic rubber comes from petroleum. Whats the rubber future?
VR11: his little Russian dandelion, this dandelion called taxodium, it produces rubber. That is the quality of rubber trees.
And it grows in temperate areas. Not swallowing up rainforest. Might our rubber future be a little dandelion?
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW