Facts - Where does the rubber come from?

It is said that Columbus discovered the indigenes of Haiti playing with a kind of ball made from the gum of a tree. The ball was lighter and bounced better than any known to him. This gum was called rubber because an early use of it was the rubbing out of pencil marks. India-rubber comes from the old Spanish word for South America, Indias. Although known from the sixteenth century onwards, rubber did not appear in quantity in Europe or the United States untíl the nineteenth century. At first, all the rubber came from trees growing wild in the Brazilian jungle. Then in 1876, the British planter Sir Henry Wickham collected some seeds from the Brazilian rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, which produced 2,700 plants in Kew Gardens, London. Nearly two thousand of the plants were shipped to Ceylon, and all the vast rubber plantations of Asia sprang from these original specimens.
The trees are planted one hundred to an acre and eventually grow to a height of 30 metres (100 feet) with a girth of 914 millimetres (36 inches). The latex-bearing tubes are in the bark, which is cut to sever them but not so deeply that the cambium, a thin skin between bark and wood, is damaged. An average 128 grammes (four and a half ounces) of látex flows from each tapping, and about 2,700 litres (600 gallons) can be expected per half hectare of trees each year.

One of the disadvantages of rubber was that it hardened in winter and became sticky in summer. The Scotsman, Charles Macintosh, tried to overcome this by making a sandwich of rubber between two layers of cloth to make the waterproof material that bears his name. A much better solution to the problem came from Charles Goodyear, an American in­ventor who heated rubber with sulphur to provide a material that retained its flexibility in low temperatures and did not become sticky in the summer heat. Thomas Hancock in London also discovered this effect and gave it the name vulcanisation. The addition of between 5 and 10 per cent sulphur gave a soft, flexible rubber, while the addition of a greater amount of sulphur produced a hard, brittle substance called vulcanite. During the Second World War an attempt was made both in Russia and the United States to grow the Russian dandelion, kok-saghyz, for its latex content. Nowadays synthetic rubbers are widely used, mainly to meet the need for an oil-resistant elastic material in car and aeroplane parts. There are many examples of synthetic rubbers. Plastics, too, are taking the place of rubber in many manufacturing industries. They can be made in a range of attractive colours and finishes and, with the use of PVC for conveyor belts, can reduce the risk of fire in such places as mines. The development of synthetic rubbers and plastics has been encouraged by the dislike of non rubber-growing countries of becoming dependent upon a product growing in an area where the political situation can be unstable. Thus an industry barely a hundred years old already shows signs of decline.