Rubber. Edith A. Browne
to popularize the new material; the first shipment was sent to Boston in 1820, and these found such favour with the Americans that a couple of years later the United States imported another 500 pairs. So quickly was this second stock sold out that the States began to think an opportunity had arisen for them to make a new outlet for their manufacturing energy and enterprise, and very soon they decided to import raw rubber and manufacture rubber goods. About the same time, some pioneer rubber-goods factories were erected on the Continent.
The factory soon began to rival the forest workshop in the variety of goods turned out, and in such details of craftsmanship as style and finish. But the new enterprise did not prove very satisfactory, because it was found that these goods did not wear well. Evidently they suffered from exposure to the air, being damaged by changes of temperature.
This great drawback to manufactured rubber goods was removed by the discovery of a method of treating rubber with sulphur. The process, called “vulcanization,” was discovered by an American named Charles Goodyear, who made his first successful experiments in 1839. He himself did much to improve his method of making rubber more durable, and he also worked up this product into a material similar to horn; but it was left for another inventive genius to find out how to polish that material and give us the very useful form of rubber which we call “vulcanite.”
The discovery of the vulcanization process acted as a very great stimulus to the rubber industry. More and more keen and widespread became the desire to manufacture rubber goods, and the growing demand for the raw material led Brazil to extend her search for Hevea trees, and to set about dealing with the export of raw rubber in a more business-like way. Up to about 1877 the forests around the mouth of the Amazon had been the only source of supply. Now some of the upper tributaries of the river were exploited, and the glowing reports as to the wealth of Hevea in the inland forests led to a rush of rubber-gatherers into the interior. It soon became known that these reports had not exaggerated the available supply of Para rubber, and fresh energy and enterprise were attracted to the Valley of the Amazon by the rosy prospects of the raw rubber trade.
“How has that trade prospered?”
The Amazon District (Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru) now has numerous competitors who cater for the world’s annual consumption of upwards of 200,000 tons of raw rubber. But up to 1912 the Amazon Valley continued to control the rubber industry, because it exported such a large proportion of the world’s whole supply of the raw material, and the quality of its output was far superior to that of the supplies from nearly every other rubber-producing country.
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