Until the beginning of the 19th century, natural rubber presented
several technical challenges. While it clearly had the potential
for useful development, no one was able to get it to the point
where it could be used commercially. Rubber rapidly became
dry and brittle during cold European winters. Worse, it became
soft and sticky when warn.
The American inventor Charles Goodyear had been experimenting
with methods to refine natural rubber for nearly a decade
before an accident enabled him to overcome these problems
with unprocessed rubber. One day in 1839, Goodyear accidentally
left a piece of raw rubber on top of a warm stove, along with
some sulfur and lead. On discovering his mistake, Goodyear
delightedly realized that the rubber had acquired a much more
usable consistency and texture. Over the next five years,
he perfected the process of converting natural rubber into
a usable commodity. This process, which Goodyear dubbed vulcanization
after the Roman god of fire, enabled the modern rubber industry
to develop.
The first rubber band was developed in 1843, when an Englishman
named Thomas Hancock sliced up a rubber bottle made by some
New World Indians. Although these first rubber bands were
adapted as garters and waistbands, their usefulness was limited
because they were unvulcanized. Hancock himself never vulcanized
his invention, but he did advance the rubber industry by developing
the masticator machine, a forerunner of the modern rubber
milling machine used to manufacture rubber bands as well as
other rubber products. In 1845, Hancock's countryman
Thomas Perry patented the rubber band and opened the first
rubber-band factory. With the combined contributions of After
the latex has been harvested and purified, it is combined
with acetic or formic acid to form rubber slabs. Next, the
slabs are squeezed between rollers to remove excess water
and pressed into bales or blocks, usually 2 or 3 square feet.
The rubber is then shipped to a rubber factory, where the
slabs are machine cut into small pieces and mixed in a Banbury
mixer with other ingredients sulfur to vulcanize it, pigments
to color it, and other chemicals to increase or diminish the
elasticity of the resulting rubber bands. After being milled,
the heated rubber strips are fed into an extruding machine
that forces the rubber out in long, hollow tubes. Goodyear,
Hancock, and Perry, manufacturing effective rubber bands became
possible.
In the late nineteenth century, British rubber manufacturers
began to foster the development of rubber plantations in British
colonies like Malaya and Ceylon. Rubber plantations thrived
in the warm climate of Southeast Asia, and the European rubber
industry thrived as well, because now it could avoid the expense
of importing rubber from the Americas, which lay beyond Britains
political and economic control.
