“Think of our industrial structure as a living thing…. and the flexing muscles and sinews of which are rubber,” proclaimed Paul W. Litchfield, then president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber, in 1939. Such claims were not without warrant; in the same year crude rubber was the largest single-imported-commodity in terms of dollar value. While humans had found various uses for rubber for thousands of years, it became a vital natural resource – and therefore valuable commodity – with the rise of modern industrial society in the 19th century.
Most natural rubber is extracted from Hevea brasiliensis trees, which are native to South America. Pre-Columbia Native Americans had used the rubber extracts from these trees to form rubber balls to play a squash-like game with. The history of rubber as a commodity begins with the European conquest of the Western hemisphere. Ships began to transport this strange substance back to Europe, creating intense interest and excitement about its potential uses. As John Tully notes in his The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber, while “[c]onsideration of the commercial and industrial possibilities of rubber date from the Enlightenment… it was not until the nineteenth century’s industrial revolution that rubber’s potential began to be realised.”
The legacy of the history of rubber is still there to
be seen
The search for reliable rubber
In 1830s New York, the financially bankrupt Charles Goodyear stumbled upon the shop of the Roxbury India Rubber Company, the first American rubber manufacturer. Following a declined offer to improve a valve on one of the company’s rubber life vest jackets, Goodyear was shown racks of melted rubber products by the store manager. The store’s rubber products had been destroyed in the hot New York summer. Unable to keep its form in high temperature, the commercial potential of rubber was severely limited. This brief encounter inspired a life-long interest in the potential of this curious material. Goodyear’s finances soon saw him end up in a jail in Philadelphia and during his internment he asked his wife to provide him with raw rubber and a rolling pin, allowing him to experiment with rubber. After his release, his attempts to improve the quality of rubber continued and in 1839 he discovered that through a mix of heat of sulphur he was able to make rubber a more stable substance, allowing it to withstand extreme temperatures. This process was known as vulcanization. Yet due to a string of a bad luck and poor business talents, Goodyear was never able to turn his efforts into commercial success.
Across the Atlantic the more business-minded Thomas Hancock had also developed an interest in rubber. Its waterproof properties first attracted Hancock, who had hopes of it being used to keep patrons of his coach passenger business dry. Working with the Glaswegian chemist Charles Macintosh, the light weight waterproof coat the Macintosh was born in the 1830s. Five years after Goodyear – seemingly independent of him- Hancock also successfully vulcanized rubber. The new and improved properties of rubber saw it put to use in a variety of products integral to modern society: hoses, footwear, piston rings, railway buffers, solid rubber tyres, foot and valve pumps for ocean steamers, rollers for press printing, life belts, handgun grips, and telegraph kit, among others. In 1858 “the first transatlantic cable was laid between Ireland and Newfoundland by civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s colossal steamship, The Great Eastern”, notes Tully. Rubber, by providing protection and insulation from the ocean water, made this possible. This precipitated a communications revolution, 200,000 nautical miles of telegraph cables being laid across the sea floor by the 1880s. According to Tully, “[b]y the 1880s, the uses of rubber seemed limitless.”
The Brazilian boom
The increasing demand for rubber led to the Amazon rubber boom between the late nineteenth century and 1920. In 1872 about 8000 tons of rubber were exported from Pará, Brazil. By 1890 this had grown three-fold to 20,000 tons. Prior to the boom, 19th century rubber extraction was usually carried out by small cooperatives, funded by trading companies. However, “as soon as it was appreciated that vast amounts of money could be made,” writes John Loadman in his Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber, “large companies run by the great…’rubber barons’ moved in.” Brazil enjoyed a near monopoly of rubber extraction and export, selling nearly 90 percent of all commercial rubber at the time. Rubber was also increasingly in demand due to automobile mass production and the development of the pneumatic tire. This made the rubber barons of Brazil fantastically wealthy. As Felipe Tâmega Fernandes of the Harvard Business School notes, “it was said that Manaus [a Brazilian town reliant on the rubber industry] diamond consumption per capita was the largest in the world, men walked with canes topped in gold and silver, children went to school in Paris or Lausanne and almost 2,500 inhabitants took first-class tickets to Europe every year.”
Akron, Ohio at the height of its industrial success, it was said, could be smelled before seen, owing to the strong smell rubber factories produce. At the turn of the century Akron was a minor Midwestern town playing only a marginal role in the growing rubber industry. The rise of mass production automobiles in the United States saw Akron take advantage of this new demand for pneumatic rubber tires. Ohio’s relatively small rubber manufactures were surpassed by large industrial operations led by men such as William O’Neil, founder of General Tire & Rubber, Harvey Firestone Sr. and Francis Seiberling’s Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (the latter was named in honour of the then-deceased and aforementioned Charles Goodyear.) By 1909 the India Rubber Journal estimated that Akron was probably the largest rubber manufacturing centre in the world. “Swept up in the rubber boom”, notes Tully, “Akron grew swiftly from a sleepy Midwestern town into a booming industrial city. The barons’ factories were built at a colossal scale, strung like immense brick battleships along the East Market and South Main, puffing clouds of smut and smoke into the air.”
Plantations of empire
The method of extracting rubber – known as tapping – was, in the years of the Brazilian boom, very crude. It was based on extracting rubber from wild growing trees, often through the use of enslaved Amazon tribes or indentured labour. This made it rather unreliable and unsuitable as a component in the mature capitalist economies of North America and Western Europe. Yet the rubber barons of Brazil, with their virtual monopoly, maintained this primitive mode of resource extraction. What was needed was the creation of tropical plantations for rubber trees, providing a more orderly and reliable method of extraction and production, suitable for modern industrial economies.
In 1876, the explorer Henry Wickham returned to London from Brazil with 70,000 seeds for rubber producing trees, planting them in Kew Gardens. Further seeds were sent to India and other parts of the eastern British Empire, but many of the seeds at first failed to adapt to conditions or were not planted in favour of other established commodities. However, with the collapse of world commodity prices in the 1890s, gradually plantations started to plant the seeds of the now valuable commodity, with most rubber plantations located in Malaya or Sumatra. By 1913 the volume of rubber being extracted from Asian plantations for the first time outstripped the volume from the Amazon region.
Rubber is increasingly created synthetically now, through the use of petroleum. Around a of third of rubber is still produced from rubber trees. The legacy of the history of rubber is still there to be seen, with the vast majority of natural rubber sourced from Asia – the trees used being those introduced to British Empire plantations in the early 20th century. In 2013 the global market for natural rubber was worth $50bn, with “[s]ix and a half mn Tons of natural rubber…estimated to have been traded bilaterally,” according to a report by Accenture.
The history of rubber as a commodity can also be seen in Akron. This Midwestern town, like so many others, was conceived in an industrial boom. With its heyday now a distant memory after the rubber industry it relied upon was outsourced, it now forms part of the American post-industrial rustbelt. The story of rubber is reflective of the story of modern industrial society. Its awareness among Europeans coincides with the European ‘discovery’ of the Americas; its application to industrial purposes coinciding with industrial revolutions; its properties integral to modern modes of transport, communications, and production. “What people did to rubber is…fascinating” wrote Vicki Baum in her 1943 novel Weeping Wood “more interesting yet…what rubber did to people.”
