Rubber or Caoutchouc

Photo credits: www.wikipedia.org & www.indiamart.com
Memory tags: First my ability to “ draw with a rubber”. Second the effect of human conflict in up scaling synthetic rubber production !

 The native North American word for rubber is caoutchouc.  I do wonder what the right pronunciation is? Academics and exams are both not possible without the rubber. On the computer, the delete key is its electronic avatar! I vividly remember trying to draw diagrams for the first time in school. The page had become near black so many times had I erased and redrawn! My teacher remarked with a quirky sense of humor, ‘ you seem to draw with your rubber!’ Things have certainly improved since then, but I am no artist and would have failed, had the rubber not gently erased my mistakes. Rubber in its natural form is a plant secretion called latex. Many plants secrete latex but few secrete enough to allow commercially profitable harvesting. Hevea brasiliensis, the Brasilian rubber tree is one such plant. Explorers to the new world from 1500s onwards brought back accounts of waterproof boots and high bouncing balls. When Christopher Columbus revisited Haiti on his second voyage, he saw some natives playing ball. Columbus and his men had brought their Castilian wind-balls to play with in idle hours. However, they found that the balls of Haiti were incomparably superior toys; they bounced better. These high bouncing balls were made from a milky fluid, the consistency of honey, which the natives harvested by tapping certain trees and then cured over the smoke of palm nuts.  One of the early uses of rubber was the eraser suggested by a relative of the famous Magellan. Since it came from the ‘indies’ it gained popularity as India rubber! As its chemical and commercial properties began to be revealed, its market demand increased dramatically. Imperial Britain, ever awake to maximizing profits, became an active player.  

A faithful servant of the empire, Henry Alexander Wickham ‘unofficially’ smuggled out a mere seventy thousand rubber seeds. The Royal Botanical Garden botanists at Kew in England grew seedlings from these seeds.  Seedlings were shipped, planted and grown in Ceylon and Malaysia. At its height the rush for ‘white gold’ as rubber was called, more than two hundred thousand tons of rubber was being exported from Malaysia in 1924!  Synthetic rubber manufactured in factories had been a slow competitor to the natural product.  During the Second World War, in 1942,after the US bombed Pearl Harbour, Japan invaded Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies and took over control of 95% of natural rubber production. All efforts were turned to scaling up synthetic rubber production from 8000 to 80,000 tons a year in the US ! Whether  natural or synthetic, rubber in its basic  form is virtually useless till chemicals are added. Then  , products   can be as soft as a sponge, as elastic as a rubber band, or as hard as a bowling ball.  Therefore chemical additives allow us to use thousands of rubber products with varying degrees of hardness every single day!

To rub out a word, to land an airplane, to run  like a gazelle on Reebok shoes, to gloves that protect our hands in surgery, to the fancy rubber band that pretty girls tie  back their hair, to  the football world cup using the teamgeist ball; to  communication, transport, furnishing is an endless list of uses, which underscores the omnipotence of rubber in our lives and civilization. And its powers, truly omnipotent!

Main resources:

1. Wikipedia
2. Encyclopedia Britannica