History of Rubber

 

THE TIMELINE OF RUBBER

The first use of rubber was by the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica. The earliest archeological evidence of the use of natural latex from the Hevea tree comes from the Olmec culture, in which rubber was first used for making balls for the Mesoamerican ballgame. 

Rubber was later used by the Maya and Aztec cultures – in addition to making balls Aztecs used rubber for other purposes such as making containers and to make textiles waterproof by impregnating them with the latex sap.

In 1770 English engineer Edward Nairne is reported to have developed the first widely marketed rubber eraser, for an inventions competition. Nairne sold natural rubber erasers for the high price of three shillings per half-inch cube. However, the raw rubber was perishable. In 1839 Charles Goodyear discovered the process of vulcanization, a method that would cure rubber, making it durable. Rubber erasers became common with the advent of vulcanization.

Before rubber erasers, people used tablets of wax to erase lead or charcoal marks from paper. Then there were rough stones such as sandstones or pumices used to remove small errors from parchment or papyrus documents written in ink. Last but not least, people in the Meiji period (1868-1912) used to use crustless bread. 

On March 17, 1845, Stephen Perry of the rubber manufacturing company Messers Perry and Co, Rubber Co Manuf London patented the fist rubber bands made of vulcanized rubber. Perry invented the rubber band to hold papers and envelopes together.

In 1894, William Stewart Halsted, the first chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, invented rubber gloves for his wife as he noticed her hands were affected by the daily surgeries she had performed and in order to prevent medical staff from developing dermatitis from surgical chemicals.

The expanded use of bicycles, and their pneumatic tires, starting in the 1890s, created an increase in demand for rubber. In 1909, a team headed by Fritz Hofmann, working at the Bayer laboratory in Elberfeld, Germany, succeeded in polymerizing isoprene, the first synthetic rubber. 

Polymerization is a process in which relatively small molecules, called monomers, combine chemically (usually carried out with a catalyst, heat, or light -often under high pressure) to produce a very large chainlike or network molecule, called a polymer. Usually, at least 100 monomer molecules must be combined to make a product that has certain unique physical properties—such as elasticity, high tensile strength, or the ability to form a fiber.

The first rubber polymer synthesized from butadiene was created in 1910 by the Russian scientist Sergei Vasiljevich Lebedev. This form of synthetic rubber, polybutadiene, provided the basis for the first large-scale commercial production by the tsarist empire (Russian Empire), which occurred during World War I as a result of shortages of natural rubber. 

By 1925 the price of natural rubber was increasing therefore many were exploring methods of producing synthetic rubber to meet the demand for rubber.  In the United States, the investigation focused on different materials from those used in Europe, building on the early laboratory work of Fr Julius Nieuwland, a professor of chemistry at the University of Notre Dame, who developed the synthesis of neoprene.

Studies published in 1930 written independently by Lebedev, the American Wallace Carothers and the German scientist Hermann Staudinger led in 1931 to one of the first successful synthetic rubbers, known as neoprene, which was developed at DuPont under the direction of E. K. Bolton. 

B. F. Goodrich Company scientist Waldo Semon developed a new and cheaper version of synthetic rubber known as Ameripol in 1940. Ameripol made synthetic rubber production much more cost-effective, helping to meet the United States' needs during World War II.

Today most synthetic rubber even synthetic latex is produced from petroleum compounds Styrene, also Butadiene to create Styrene-Butadiene rubber known as SBR.

There are also rubber-like materials such as Silicone and PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride).