Rubber Stretches Over Two Anniversaries
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Rubber Stretches Over Two Anniversaries Life got much easier for children at play a Century ago this year. In 1888 in Belfast John Boyd Dunlop, a successful Scottish veterinarian, invented the pneumatic tire to provide a more comfortable ride for his son's tricycle. Dunlop tested his tire in Great Britain in 1888 and in the United States in 1890. The smoother ride of airfilled tires instead of the previous solid rubber ones helped bring about the cycling craze of the 1890s. After Dunlop's patent was issued, it was discovered that the principle of the pneumatic tire had already been patented in 1846, but Dunlop held enough accessory patents to keep his Company going successfully, though he never did make a fortune from his invention. He sold the Company along with his patent in 1896. Rubber will be celebrating another important anniversary next year—150 years ago, in 1839, Charles Goodyear discovered the vulcanization process by spilling a mixture of rubber latex and sulfur on a hot stove. Vulcanization made rubber into the useful, durable material familiär to everyone today. Rubber had been used centuries earlier in the New Wforld. When Christopher Columbus returned from Haiti, he supposedly broughtback rubber balls that he had seen the Indians bouncing against a tree. (This account was written more than 100 years after Columbus returned, so some historians doubt its authenticity.) Other Spanish explorers later learned how the South American Indians made waterproof shoes by smearing the milky white latex from rubber trees on their feet and allowing it to dry. They also made rubber bottles in much the same way.. .spreading the latex over a clay form and, when the latex had hardened, washing away the clay from the inside. In 1735, the explorer Charles Marie de La Condamine—who had been commissioned by the Academy of Science of Paris to measure a degree of the meridian in South America—sent back to France hardened latex samples from Peru. The English chemist Joseph Priestley (better known as the discoverer of oxygen) noticed in 1770 that balls of the hardened latex could be used to rub out pencil marks...from this we get the name "rubber." Liquid latex couldn't be shipped back across the ocean since it would dry out on MRS BULLETIN/JULY1988
the voyage. Instead, crude masses of hardened raw rubber were shipped in cakes or balls. Once the shipments reached Europe, the problem was how to manipulate the rubber into a more desirable form. Two Frenchmen, surgeon L.A.P. Herissant and chemist Pierre Joseph Macquet, introduced the use of turpentine and pure ether as solvents for the hardened latex. Using their technique, they were able to make some of the first rubber surgical instruments. Others soon discovered that this Solution of latex and turpentine—rubber
cement—could make a waterproof cloth. In 1823 Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh began producing his famous raincoats, misspelled as "mackintoshes," that consisted of two layers of cloth coated with the rubber cement Solution and then sandwiched together. Macintosh in
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