Rubber got its English name from erasing pencil marks
In 1770 Joseph Priestley noticed that a lump of the strange South American gum rubbed pencil marks off paper beautifully, and the name rubber stuck. Olmec players had been bouncing balls made from the same tree sap for millennia, and Mesoamericans were stabilising it as early as 1600 BC.
Natural rubber is a polymer of isoprene, collected mostly as latex from the Pará rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis. Workers cut the bark and catch the milky white fluid in cups, a process called tapping, and a well-managed tree answers the wound by producing more latex for years. After the Olmecs, the Maya and Aztecs used it for balls, containers and waterproofed cloth. Europe caught on slowly: Charles Marie de La Condamine brought samples to the French Academy of Sciences in 1736, spelling the local word as caoutchouc, and Charles Goodyear worked out vulcanization, its toughening treatment, in 1839.
For much of the 19th century South America supplied the world, until 1876, when Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 seeds out of Brazil to Kew Gardens. Only 2,400 sprouted, but seedlings travelled on to Ceylon, India, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore and Malaya. At the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Henry Ridley handed out seeds and devised a way to tap trees without badly harming them, earning the nickname Mad Ridley. Malaya became the biggest producer of all.
The boom had a brutal side. In King Leopold II's Congo Free State, rubber was gathered largely by forced labour under violently enforced quotas, and slave raids tore through Amazon communities in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Roger Casement helped expose abuses in both places, bitterly remarking that India rubber now rubbed out the Indians.
Demand soon outran trees, and synthetic rubber was first made in 1909. When Japan seized Malaya and the Dutch East Indies in early 1942, the United States lost nearly all its supply and poured effort into synthetics. Natural rubber still matters: Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia lead production, and researchers are trying alternatives. German scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute bred a Kazakh dandelion suited to commercial rubber in 2013 and started a pilot plant with Continental Tires, succeeding where Nazi-era dandelion projects had failed. The stretch itself comes from its molecules: relaxed rubber is a tangle of wrinkled chains that pull back when straightened.
Source: Natural rubber
