Rubber

RUBBER

RUBBER. Although rubber-yielding plants are native to Africa and Asia as well as to the Americas, the first mention of rubber in the West was made by Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, the Italian representative to the court of Spain (De Rebus Oceanicis et Novo Orbe, 1516). In the early seventeenth century, Juan de Torquemada (Monarquía Indiana, 1615) described how the Mexican Indians used a milk-like fluid drawn from a tree for religious rites and sport, and for making crude footwear, waterproof bottles, and garments. Although a little rubber was used in Europe in the eighteenth century to make erasers—it derived its name "rubber" for its property of rubbing out (erasing) pencil marks—along with elastic thread, surgical tubes, and experimental balloons, the rubber manufacturing industry was not established until the nineteenth century.

The first record of rubber in the United States is a patent for gum elastic varnish for footwear issued to Jacob F. Hummel in 1813. This was followed by a patent for a grinding and mixing machine granted to John J. Howe in 1820. Prompting these first steps was the profitable trade in crude rubber shoes imported into Boston and New York City from Brazil. By 1833, America's pioneering rubber factory was established at Roxbury, Massachusetts. Other rubber shoe and clothing factories soon appeared elsewhere in Massachusetts, as well as in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania. By 1840, the infant industry had experienced a speculative boom (about $2 million in stock was issued) and a disastrous collapse. The primary cause for the loss of confidence was that rubber products had not proven reliable—they softened in the heat and stiffened in the cold—but the downturn in general business conditions that began in the fall of 1837 only added to the industry's distress. So great were the industry's troubles that in 1843 the Roxbury Rubber Company sold the "monster" spreading machine (built by Edwin Marcus Chaffee in 1837) for $525; it had been purchased for $30,000.

Although experiments to cure rubber have been attributed to the eighteenth-century Swedish physician and pharmacist Petter-Jonas Bergius, it remained for Charles Goodyear to solve the basic technical problem confronting early rubber manufacturers. He did so in 1839, at Woburn, Massachusetts, when he developed the "vulcanization process," which gives rubber durability and consistent qualities across a broad range of temperatures by treating it with sulfur and white lead at a high temperature. His samples of "cured" rubber, with which he tried to raise funds in England, prompted the English inventor Thomas Hancock to make his own "discovery" of vulcanization. The "elastic metal" provided by these two inventors would soon prove indispensable to the Western world.

Nowhere was this more marked than in the development of the automobile industry. Yet long before the automobile appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, America's consumption of raw rubber had grown twenty fold—from 1,120 short tons in 1850 to 23,000 tons in 1900 (two-fifths of the world total of 59,000 short tons). Wherever elastic, shock-absorbing, water-resistant, insulating, and air-and steam-tight properties were required, vulcanized rubber was used. Most of the raw rubber came from Brazil, with Africa the second-most important source. The problem was not to find rubber but to find the labor to collect it in the almost inaccessible forests and ship it to the factories of the Northern Hemisphere. Until the systematic development of plantation rubber in Southeast Asia in the twentieth century made collection and transportation a comparatively easy task, the growing demand for crude rubber could only be met at increased cost. In 1830, Para rubber was 20 cents a pound; in 1900 the annual average wholesale price had risen to about a dollar.

Between 1849 and 1900, the industry's output of manufactured goods—chiefly footwear, mechanicals (for use with machinery), proofed and elastic goods, surgical goods, bicycle tires, and toys—increased in value from $3 million to $53 million. In the same years, the industry's workforce grew from 2,500 to 22,000. Because of the economies of scale and the absence of product differentiation, the market for rubber products was fiercely competitive—hence the tendency for the early rubber manufacturers to band together. Before the Civil War, marketing arrangements were already in existence to control the sale of footwear and other products. By the eve of World War I, production had come to be dominated by the "Big Four": Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, United States Rubber Company, B. F. Goodrich Company, and Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Partly to be close to the carriage-making industry—at the time the rubber industry's major consumer—the center of rubber manufacture had shifted from the towns of New England to Akron, Ohio. The industry's first branch factories were established in Western Europe in the 1850s.

The most dramatic phase of the industry's growth followed the introduction of the internal combustion engine, cheap petroleum, and the widespread use of the pneumatic tire in the early 1900s. Between 1900 and 1920, consumption of raw rubber increased tenfold—to 231,000 short tons. Even the world depression of the early 1930s only temporarily halted the industry's rapid expansion. By 1940, the United States was consuming 726,000 tons of a world total of 1,243,000 tons of crude rubber. Between 1900 (when the first four tons of Southeast Asia plantation rubber had reached the market) and 1910, the annual average wholesale price per pound of crude rubber doubled from $1 to $2. By 1915, more than twice as much rubber was coming from the plantations of Southeast Asia than from America and Africa combined, and prices had fallen to a quarter of their 1910 level; on 2 June 1932, the price was just three cents a pound.

Partly because of the great fluctuations in the price of crude rubber, and partly because the plantation industry of the Far East was largely in British hands, the industry began a search for rubber substitutes in the 1920s. In the next decade, manufacturers produced a few hundred tons a year of a special type of synthetic rubber. As Japan seized the rubber lands of Southeast Asia during World War II, U.S. production of synthetic rubber increased a hundredfold—from 9,000 short tons in 1941 to 919,000 tons in 1945, at which point synthetic rubber met four-fifths of America's needs. By 1973, of a world output of 6.3 million metric tons, the United States produced about 40 percent, almost three times more than the next greatest producer, Japan. That year, the United States had consumed only 696,000 metric tons of a world output of approximately 3.5 million tons of natural rubber.

Chemists succeeded in not only synthesizing rubber by making a wide range of elastomers and plastomers available, they changed the character of the industry until it was no longer possible to distinguish between rubber and rubber substitutes. The price of the synthetic compared favorably with that of the natural product, and for some uses synthetic rubber was preferable.

The rise of other industrialized nations in the twentieth century reduced America's domination of the industry; even so, its output in 1970 (including plastics) was worth about $15 billion and the industry employed more than half a million workers. In 1987, the American rubber industry shipped $24.9 billion in goods, of which automobile tires accounted for $10.5 billion of that amount. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 230,000 people were employed in the rubber industry in the United States in 1987. Although rubber was used in thousands of ways, automobile tires—with which the major technical developments in manufacture have been associated—continued to account for more than one-half of the industry's consumption of raw materials. The overwhelming size of the major rubber corporations (a fifth giant was added to the Big Four in 1915 when the General Tire and Rubber Corporation was formed at Akron) did not lessen the industry's competitive nature. After World War II, the tendency toward global expansion increased, and, in the late twentieth century, the major rubber manufacturers were worldwide in scope and operation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, P. W. Natural Rubber and the Synthetics. New York: Wiley, 1972.

EPA Office of Compliance Sector. Profile of the Rubber and Plastic Industry. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1995.

Howard, Frank A. Buna Rubber: The Birth of an Industry. New York: Van Nostrand, 1947.

Phillips, Charles F. Competition in the Synthetic Rubber Industry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.

Schidrowitz, Philip, and T. R. Dawson, eds. History of the Rubber Industry. Cambridge, U.K.: Heffer, 1952.

Woodruff, W. "Growth of the Rubber Industry of Great Britain and the United States." Journal of Economic History 15, no. 4 (1955): 376–391.

William Woodruff / c. w.

See also Boot and Shoe Manufacturing ; Chemical Industry ; Indian Technology ; Industrial Revolution ; Petrochemical Industry .