History of Rubber

South America around 3,000 years ago. On a special flat court, a man rushes at a line of opponents, clutching a 7-kilogram lump of vegetable matter. Aristocrats lining the sides of the court cheer wildly as he barges through the opposition and scores a point for his team. He hurls the lump down and, curiously, it rebounds slightly; it is a very special lump.

Three and a half millennia later, almost every machine there is – from space rockets to egg whisks – relies on components made from that bouncy matter. Entire national economies are built on it. It is fundamental to millions of human lives and the development of the modern world. It is rubber.

Magic material
Two millennia after the Mayans bounced their first balls, Europeans became intrigued by this strange substance. One of the most unusual things that Christopher Columbus and his followers came across in the New World was rubber, says Joe Jackson, author of the book The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire. As he put it: “There were two things reported back: bouncing balls and boots.”

According to Dr Dorothy Hosler, professor of archaeology and ancient technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, the original Mayan ball game could not have been developed without them having invented the technology to process rubber. Hosler’s research indicates that the prehistoric chemists mixed raw latex, which was extracted from the native Castilla elastica tree with juice from the morning glory vine (Ipomoea alba) to get that initial bounce.
But it wasn’t until 1735 that a French explorer and scientist really got the ball rolling. Charles-Marie de La Condamine was in Brazil when indigenous people showed him how they collected the milky white latex sap from Hevea brasiliensis trees by scarring the bark and attaching a coconut shell cup to catch the drips. They used the sap to make solid rubber balls, hollow human figurines and bindings to hold stone axe heads to wooden shafts.

Soon, the lumps of rubber that made it back to Europe became a sought-after curiosity, being uniquely waterproof and stretchy. They were dubbed caoutchouc, the French spelling of the South American term for “weeping wood”. One early use in England was for rubbing out pencil marks on paper, so it was christened “rubber”, a name that is still used today.

However, early rubber was not perfect; it became sticky, soft, smelly and rotten when warm – and hard when cold. The tipping point came in 1839 when Charles Goodyear, a bankrupt American hardware merchant, created vulcanisation, a process he named after the Roman god of fire, Vulcan, because heat was crucial to the process. By adding white lead and sulphur to raw latex and heating it, he made the material resilient, tough, weatherproof and durable across a much wider temperature range – without impairing its elasticity. It was just what the rapidly industrialising world was waiting for.