March 17: Birthday of Green Beer and Rubberbands

March 17 is famous for more than green beer and St. Patrick Day parades.  On this day in 1845, the rubberband was born.

Stephen Perry owned Perry and Company, a rubber manufacturing company in London, England.  While working with vulcanized rubber, he created and patented the thin, stretchy, and oh-so-useful product we know as the rubberband.

The history of rubber is quite interesting.  Its first known forms were used by the Mayans, who found that the bark of rubber trees produced a latex substance that was stretchy and pliable, but hardened into a springy mass when exposed to air.  Morning glory vines grew all around the rubber trees, and its sap was used as a hallucinogen.  But when combined with the latex, (one wonders where the thought came from….) a black substance with a texture similar to gum erasers was formed.  They used this substance to make rubber balls, hollow figurines, and long ropes with which they made several tools and weapons, such as binding an axe head to its handle, or a spear head to its shaft.  Natives in the region still use this mixture today.

In 1736 several rolls of the stuff made its way to France.  It fascinated all who saw it, and inventors excitedly began dreaming up new uses for it.  Samuel Peal mixed it with turpentine and discovered a means of waterproofing cloth in 1791.  Joseph Priestly found out it would remove pencil marks from paper.  Scottish inventor Charles Macintosh mixed it with a coal-tar naptha and patented a thick waterproof fabric that could be cut and sewn.  In 1823 he bonded a wool lining to it and created the Macintosh raincoats.

Thomas Hancock joined with Macintosh in rubber production, and brought the industry to England.  He invented and patented the masticator which shredded used rubber.  The masticated rubber was used for pneumatic cushions, mattresses, pillows, and packing material.  He also found a way to form the masticated rubber into blocks or rolled sheets.  From this came bellows, hose, tubing, solid tires, shoes, and springs.

Charles Goodyear, an American, is credited with the invention of the vulcanization process that produces modern rubber.  In 1839, while mixing rubber, lead, and sulphur, the stuff was accidentally dropped on a hot stove.  The result was a substance that didn’t melt when heated or grow brittle when cold, and would snap back to its original shape when stretched.  This new rubber wasn’t affected by weather, was more resistant to water and chemical reactions, and did not conduct electricity.

Rubber tree plantations for harvesting the latex were formalized by Sir Henry Wickham.  He collected rubber tree seeds from the lower Amazon region of Brazil and grew the trees in London.  From this planting, plantations were started in the East Indies, Ceylon, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.  Later Africa also developed commercial plantations.  South America, where the trees grow wild, never used the product as an export.

Today rubber still has a huge market, but more than half of produced rubber is actually synthetic.  The United States was cut off from rubber supplies during World War II, and stepped up synthetic production for use during the war effort.  There are now about twenty grades of synthetic or blended rubber, made from byproducts of petroleum refining.  Butadiene and styrene are combined in a reactor containing soapsuds and produces a milky liquid latex.  When coagulated from the liquid, it produces rubber ‘crumbs’ that are sold to manufacturers who melt it for use in numerous products and processes.

Source:

Bambustic RubberBands