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Vol. 18, No. 11
RAW RUBBER SYMPOSIUM Papers presented before the Division of Rubber Chemistry at the 72nd Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Philadelphia, Pa., September 5 to 11, 1926
The Importance of Rubber in Modern Civilization By Edwin E. Slosson SCIENCE SERVICE, WASHINGTON, D. C.
HIS IS the fiftieth anniversary of various events, some of which have a particular interest for us. It is for one thing the fiftieth birthday of the AMERICAN CmnfICAL SOCIETY, the largest association of its sort in the world. It was formed in 1876 by a group of chemists who had met two years before at Northumberland, Pa., the home of Joseph Priestley, on the hundredth anniversary of his discovery of oxygen. The reverend scientist had here sought refuge after he had escaped from Birmingham where a mob had burned his house. It is owing to Priestley that the versatile substance we are discussing today received its inappropriate name of rubber. When a sample of caoutchouc was sent to Priestley, he, being an author, perceived the value of the material as a means of eradicating his mistakes. The test of a good author is his knowing how to use both ends of his pencil a t proper times. But yet it was a poor guess on the future value of the strange product. At the present time less than one-tenth of one per cent of the rubber produced in the world is used for erasers. The native name of the stuff can be pronounced properly by those only who are proficient with the ancient Toltec language. I could not even spell it if I had not a competent stenographer. Nor do I like the name that Goodyear called it by--l‘gum elastic.” But for popular consumption any one of the three names is preferable to what the chemists call it “polymerized methylbutadiene.” It is also fifty years since the Centennial was held in Philadelphia, the first and most influential of the long series of world fairs in America. Among the various inventions exhibited a t the Centennial one of the most important was one which attracted at first little attention, a small table in an out-of-the-way corner of the Education Building, where Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated that it was possible to convey speech over a wire. It is not necessary for me before this audience to show what part the rubber industry has played in the development of the telephone and its offspring, the radio. Eighteen seventy-six also marks the opening of another era of still greater importance to the rubber industry, for it was in that year that Dr. N. A. Otto, of Cologne, Germany, invented the engine which is run by the explosion of compressed gas. The internal combustion engine has in the fifty years since become the rival of the steam engine, which came into use a hundred years earlier. But the automobile could not come into popularity until it was provided with a rubber tread. At present 80 per cent of the rubber consumed in the United States goes to the making of motor vehicle tires, This is also the semicentennial anniversary of another epoch-making event in the romantic history of rubber. For it is about fifty years since Sir Joseph Hooker, director of the Kew Gardens, near London, sent three expeditions
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to Brazil to procure seeds of rubber trees. Of the three collectors, Henry Wickham was most successful. He secured 70,000 seeds from the upper Amazon and conveyed them out of the country in secret. The Kew Gardens germinated 2800 and sent some of the seedlings to Ceylon and Singapore. Seeds obtained from the Ceylon trees were distributed in 1881 to Java, the Malay States, and India. From this triple transplanting came the stock from which have sprung the 800 million trees of the eastern Asiatic plantations. I see by the papers that England is going to pay off her war debt to the United States by growing rubber. It reminds me of an old Lincoln story. When a friend, fresh from the front, reported to him the rumor that General Grant was addicted to whisky, President Lincoln was interested at once and asked: “Can you tell me where I can get a barrel of the same brand to send to the other generals?” I wonder if we can’t get the French to grow something How much would our tires be costing now if the British had not started planting rubber trees fifty years ago and the world had to depend on what latex could be squeezed out of the wild rubber trees on the Amazon and Congo? If in the years when our first Centennial was celebrated a t Philadelphia one of our botanical gardens had sent expeditions to the Amazon to collect rubber seeds and had planted them in tropical territory, we should not have been in our present embarrassing situation. Research is a fine thing at any time, but it is better fifty years ahead of time than fifteen years behind time. In my humble opinion the British deserve what they are getting as a reward for their foresight and we deserve what we are getting for our lack of it. It is a fine tribute to British finance that in the money market a pound sterling is equal to $4.87. It is a fine tribute to British foresight that on the rubber exchange a sixpence is equal to 91.20. The Dutch are equally successful in the East Indies. Our Yankee ancestors used sometimes to boast that they could “beat the Dutch.” Why can’t we nowadays? Congress has had to appropriate a half ndlion to investigate the curious botanical problem, why Hevea brasiliensis never grows in the shade of the American flag. Cultivation under Scientific Control
The change from rubber-hunting to rubber-growing is a step of wide significance, since it foreshadows the transition that must take place in all tropical products. The gold seekers in an unknown country such as Australia, South Africa, and Central America pick up such nuggets as they can find on the surface or gold ornaments that they can purloin from the natives. Later gold seekers sink shafts deep into the quartz reef and treat the tailings with cyanide to extract the last traces of the precious metal. The cowboys of Texas and the rancheros of the Argentine
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I S D C S T R I A L A N D ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
in the early days took little interest in the breeding and the feeding of their cattle. They were hunters rather than herdsmen and the cattle to them were almost as much wild game as the buffaloes. The modern expert in animal husbandry, on the contrary, cultivates his stock as the horticulturist his plants. He counts the chromosomes and calculates the calories. The difference between the primitive methods prevailing in the tropics and cultivation under the control of science is shown by the comparison of the rival sugar crops, the beet and the cane. I n both cases the chemist has had a certain control over the processes of extraction and purification and has done wonders in the preparation of the pure, clean, white sugar of commerce. But in the case of the sugar beet the chemist also had charge of the cultivation of the plant and, under his guidance, the beet was put through a course of eugenics for more than a century by which it had greatly improved in sweetness of disposition, the sugar content rising from six to eighteen. On the contrary, in the case of cane the chemist was confined to the factory and rarely ventured into the field. He made the most of what was given to him, but the cane was grown from chance seedlings and carelessly gathered. Only recently in the face of competition from beet sugar have the cane raisers of the tropics given attention to the primary improvement of the crop. The transplantation of the rubber tree from the forest to the field has given an opportunity for its scientific development and control. The planters of the Far East, who are now reaping a rich reward for their foresight and care, are devoting a certain amount of their profits to the scientific study of their problem. I n Java and Sumatra the planters support six experiment stations which are engaged in research in rubber culture. The Western Hemisphere has so far no experiment stations of this sort and the problem is only beginning to be investigated. Dr, W. A. Orton, director of the Tropical Plant Research Foundation of Washington, who is working out a plan of research on rubber, gives me the following outline of the problems of rubber cultivation in the western tropics: A-Problems of preliminary treatment of land: (1) Clean clearing as practiced in the East versus cheaper methods used in banana cultivation in the West. ( 2 ) Sanitation, soil drainage, and cover crops in relation t o growth of Hevea and possible development of disease. ( 3 ) Intercrops (catch crops) of the West in relation t o the growth of Hevea, and comparable value in defraying expense of bringing rubber into bearing, such as bananas, cassava, etc. B-Problems connected with procuring the best and most productive types or varieties of planting stock: (1) Introduction of seed and bud wood of t h e best strains of Hevea from the East. ( 2 ) Introduction of new strains from the Amazon region with the object of securing not only higher yields but superior quality, or rubber with special properties for different uses. (3) Study and selection work in one or more of existing plantings of Hevea in Hayti, Nicaragua, Panama, or Colombia for the purpose of learning behavior under western conditions and locating best trees for planting material. C-Problems connected with tapping: (1) Thorough study of methods employed on rubber estates in Trinidad, as well as of all other phases of the industry there, in order t o utilize t o full adyantage experience already gained with rubber in the western tropics. (2) Fetermination of the relative value of the more common oriental systems of tapping under western conditions, and the development of new methods t o be tested, with respect t o yield, bark renewal, diseases of tapping out, labor type and supply, and other economic factors. D-The control of diseases and insects and other pests of rubber: (1) A survey of existing Hevea plantings and wild trees to discover all enemies of the plant and record their distribution, prevalence, and relative importance.
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(2) TO study t h e South American leaf disease in Trinidad, Guiana, and Brazil, its nature, the danger of spread t o other regions, and the possibilities of control through choice of adapted soil or location for planting or through the selection of resistant strains. (3) Survey of areas t o be planted for occurrence of Fomes and other root-rot diseases which require expensive clearing and burning in preparing land for rubber planting in the East. (4) The protection of new plantations against pests or diseases through adequate inspection, treatment of seeds or plants, or by quarantine.
When I visited Demerara in 1917, 'I saw a hand,come grove of young Hevea trees just about to come into bearing, but now I hear that the plantations of British Guiana have been devasted by the leaf blight. This disease is endemic in the Amazon valley, where nevertheless the trees survivz scattered through the forest. They have evidently reached a some sort of modus vivendi with the fungi and insect foes, having fought them to a standstill in past years. But as often happens when a plant is brought under cultivation, the diseases, that afflict it little in the wild, sweep over a 'plantation 'like a fire through a timber town. Fortunately the infection is not carried by the seeds, so the South American leaf disease was not transported to the new home of the rubber tree in eastern Asia. But does it owe its immunity to its powers of resistance or its escape from temptation? Suppose some commercial rival or political enemy should secretly infect the plantations of Sumatra or the Straits with the disease? The rubber growers might be ruined and American automobiles would be running on bare rims. Such a risk is too great to be incurred. 'l'hough no way has yet been found to eradicate the leaf disease where it has found a foothold, yet certain trees have been observed standing uninjured in the midst of an infected district. Are these endowed with natural immunity and if so is that trait carried over to their saplings or seedlings? This is one of the questions that needs to be investigated without delay by the rubber industry as part of its policy of life insurance. The nlbber planters might do for their trees what the dairymen have done for their cows-make them better milkers. It is by no means certain that the plantations of the Middle East were seeded from the best trees in the world and it is quite certain that the stock could be improved by scientific selection and cultivation. Individual trees in the same grove d 8 e r widely in their yield of latex and it may a t least be possible to bring the average in the future up to the best of the present. Economic Value of Tropical Territory
All wealth comes from the expenditure of energy in the service of man. All energy so used comes from the central power house of the solar system in the form of wireless waves. All parts of the world share in this shower of golden sunshine owing to the ingenious device by which the globe is rotated diurnally on frictionless bearings without the use of any power. But only the tropics get the solar rays directly from the zenith. To other parts of the world they come on a slant and have to pass through a longer layer of air. An acre of land on the equator receives in the course of a year 26 per cent more solar energy than an acre at 40 degrees latitude. Yet the tropics, which are the richest part of the world in this natural endowment, make the least use of it. IVhere Kature provides the most energy the people show the least. They would contribute little or nothing to the wealth of the outside world if it were not for the instigation and enterprise of the men of the temperate zone. The United States is handicapped in comparison with
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her commercial rivals by lack of tropical territory. England, France, Holland, and Portugal are far more fortunate in this respect. England has about a hundred times as much territory as the United States in tropical or semitropical climes; France has over thirty-four times; Holland and Portugal have each more than seven times as much as the United States. A realization of the future value of “a place in the sun” led to a contest between the leading nations of the world, which began in 1884 and ended in the Great War. The American people took little interest in this boom in tropical real estate and it was more by accident than foresight that we acquired possession of the Philippines. From what we hear it seems that the situation in the Philippines resembles that of Ireland, except that the cardinal points are reversed. The northern islanders are clamoring for complete independence while the southern islanders appear to prefer to retain the connection with the United States. We are led to infer that the Moros of Mindanao share the love of the Malay race for the raising of rubber and are anxious to emulate the success of Java and the Straits, if only the northern Filipinos would alloy them to sell farms larger than 2500 acres. The islands of Mindanao, Basilan, and Jolo are reported to contain more than a million acres of land suitable for rubber raising. Mr. Whitford, head of the Crude Rubber Survey of the Department of Commerce, said: One-third of the planted area of the middle east is what is called “native rubber,” which comes from a vast number of small plots, varying from a garden patch t o 4 or 5 acres in sizesome will reach 25 and a few 100 acres or more. Out of 469 companies mostly in Malay and Ceylon the average holdings are less than 2500 acres.
This seems “small pickings” compared with the 120,000 acres of plantations run by the United States Rubber Company in Sumatra and Malaya, but such patches are producing a large part of the rubber whose profits we complain of. It is quite possible, without change in the Philippine land laws that rubber might be grown in large aggregates by peasant farmers on small holdings. It must be admitted that exploitation of the tropics has been most successful by coolie labor on large plantations, but that is evidently not the only way and perhaps not the best way. As agriculture more and more follows the forms of factory production, a system of scientific control and centralized management becomes essential. The plants and the population must be protected from disease, the product must be standardized, and the marketing must be regulated for the local community; yet all that is compatible with a rCgime of small holdings and individual management, as is shown, for instance, by citrus growers and the dairy farmers where strict chemical and biological control is enforced under a cooperative system of production. The Industry in Africa
I have just received the reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and am much struck by the contrast between the parent association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, In the British Association much more attention is given to the scientific aspects of the industrial and commercial development of the country than is customary in the American Association. At the recent Oxford meeting the presidential address of the Section on Geography was given by the Hon. W. OrmsbyGore, Member of Parliament and Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, who spoke on “The Economic Development of Tropical Africa and Its Effect on the Native Population.” He began by calling attention to the fact that
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“four million square miles of Africa lie within the British Empire. In fact there is more of the British Empire in Africa than in any other Continent. British North America and Australasia are both smaller in area than the African possessions of the Crown. Approximately three-quarters of this African area lie within the Tropics.” The advantages which Great Britain gets from her African dependencies may be illustrated by a few of the figures that he gives. The domestic exports of Nigeria in 1921 were valued a t $41,250,000; in 1925 they had risen to $85,000,000, more than double. In 1921 the Gold Coast products were valued a t $30,000,000; in 1925 they were worth $52,500,000. These examples of expansion in West Africa are eclipsed by the rate of progress in East Africa. The domestic exports of Kenya and Uganda in 1921 were $11,250,000, in 1925, $39,100,000. What used to be German East Africa, but is now rechristened Tanganyika Territory, produced in 1921 products valued at $5,000,000; in 1925 these were $14,500,000. The two most sensational examples of the expansion have been cocoa in the Gold Coast and cotton in Uganda. The exportation of cocoa from the Gold Coast rose from 7000 tons in 1905 to 78,000 tons in 1915 and 220,000 tons (nearly half the world’s total supply) in 1925. The peanut, which most Americans regard as merely a rival for popcorn as a midmeal nibble, is becoming in Africa a source of oil for shortening, for soap-making, and for Diesel engines. The export of peanuts from Nigeria was nothing in 1910 and 120,000 tons last year. These figures will serve to intimate the rich revenues which Great Britain is gaining from the African territories which she possessed before the war and which she has acquired from Germany through the war. The United States owns no tropical territory in the New World, except Porto Rico and the Canal Zone. Porto Rico is overcrowded already and the Canal Zone is largely preoccupied for military purposes. But political control is not necessary for commercial development if economic opportunities are open, and since the United States Government has no aspiration for annexation of territory there is no reason why American manufacturers of rubber goods should not establish plantations in Central and South America as they do now in Dutch Sumatra and British Malaya. In Africa there is an excellent opening, since Liberia was founded by us and has been regarded as under our paternal protection ever since. The founding of Liberia was the resultant of two opposing forces. Southern slaveholders and Yankee Abolitionists, at arms on all other points, could unite only on this, an effort to give the freedmen a free chance in their fatherland. The American Colonization Society was founded a t a meeting in the Capitol building a t M7ashington in 1816. Henry Clay presided and Francis Key, author of the Star Spangled Banner, was a vice president. In 1831 the State of Maryland established another colony on the coast, stipulating that prohibition should be inserted in its constitution. Liberia has by no means fulfilled the hopes and prayers of its philanthropic founders. It was too much to expect that a few thousand colonists whose only education and training had been in slavery should civilize and Christianize the Dark Continent. Sixteen species of wild rubber have been found in the hinterland, but collecting latex in snail shells from vines in a jungle is a slow process. But if Mr. Firestone’s enterprise should be carried out on the scope announced it will open a new era to Liberia. The United States has, as it did not have a hundred years ago, a large number of negroes trained in technical and trade
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INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
schools, some who have received professional education and a few who are prepared to carry on research in botany, chemistry, and agriculture. Some of these may find in Liberia an opportunity for the employment of their ability that is denied them in the United States. According to Sir Harry Johnston, the foremost authority on Liberia, the ancestors of most of the negroes now in the United States were slaves captured in this region and, if there is anything in the adaptation of race to environment, their descendants may have an advantage over the whites in this climate. The unhappy history of the Congo shows the dangers of forest production. An American journalist, Henry M. Stanley, sent out t o find Livingstone, found a kingdom. The heart of Darkest Africa was proved to be rich in undeveloped resources, and this brought before the world the question of how these resources could be developed on equal teims to all nations and without detriment to the inhabitants. It was eventually decided by the philanthropists and statesmen concerned that these aims could be best secured by establishing a ‘Congo Free State” under the protection of the Powers and in the hands of a Christian monarch of a disinterested and philanthropic character. They chose for this office a benevolent-looking old gentleman with a long white beard, but somehow in the course of time the Free State of the philanthropists became the “Private Domain’, of King Leopold, and was exploited by him in Europe for the benefit of a “privttte domain,” which exploded in a public scandal. The United States of America was the first great power to recognize the Congo State in 1884, and Henry Sanford, U. S. Minister a t Brussels, took a prominent part in its organization a t the Conference of Berlin. The Powers pledged themselves to the declarations that “All the Powers exercising sovereign rights of influence in the aforesaid territories bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes and to care for the improvement of the condition of their moral and material well-being and to help in suppressing slavery and especially the slave trade** The trade of all nations shall enjoy equal freedom.” Never were good intentions more quickly and cruelly frustrated. The Congo, which was to be forever free from the curse of war, greed, slavery, and alcohol, became subject to the ravages of all four. Worse than slayery in some ways was the treatment of the natives by the ruthless rubber hunters. Ahfen and women flogged and lulled, villages burned, communities wiped out, children tortured and mutilated, heads and hands collected in heaps as penalty for deficient income of caoutchouc. I shall never forget the sickening shock I received when as an editor of The Independent I had to handle the photographs sent in by our American missionaries in the Congo, of children whose hands had been cut off by their task-master as a warning to bring in more rubber. The revelation of the Congo atrocities eventually effected a reform in the r6gime and transferred the administration of the territory from the King of the Belgians to the Belgians themselves. Time brings its vindication and we rejoice to see that Emile Vandervelde, who courageously championed the cause of the oppressed negro against his own sovereign, Leopold 11, is now Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Belgian Cabinet. This is ancient history now, for thirty years is the equivalent of a century when a World War intervenes. I revive it to show the new and true way of tropical development in contrast with the old and cruel way that previously prevailed. I presume the plantation workers of Sumatra and Malaya have their hardships, but their lot is a happy one compared with the natives of Putamayo and the Congo under the old r6gime.
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Synthetic Rubber
If you listen-in long enough at any public garage you are apt to hear these two bits of popular folklore voiced in the course of the conversation: No. 1: “Yep, the chemists have got a synthetic gasoline t h a t costs less than half as much as this and gives twice the power but the oil men have bought up the patent and are holding it off the market.” No. 2 : “Since the cost of tires has gone up so, why can’t the chemists discover a way of making artificial rubber?” “They have, but the process is being kept secret so as to keep up prices. I got that straight from a man on the inside of the rubber business.”
This implicit faith in the unlimited powers of the synthetic chemist is flattering but, I fear, unfounded. Even a chemist has to have something to start with and it is hard to find anything cheaper than latex to make it of. I remember well that dramatic scene on September 9, 1912, in the great hall of the College of the City of New York a t the Eighth International Congress of Applied Chemistry, when Carl Duisberg displayed t,he automobile tires made at Alberfeld, Germany. At the same meeting, where the rivalry between British and German chemist,s was so marked as to portend the coming storm, Sir William Perkin, pioneer in the field of aniline dyes, countered by announcing his method of making rubber out of potatoes. But Dr. Duisberg, even in his pean of triumph over German synthetic chemistry, was not over-sanguine about the commercial success of artificial rubber. He said: The difficulties which have been overcome were great indeed and these which still remain t o be surmounted, in order t o produce a substance equal to Para caoutchouc in quality and capable of competing with cheap plantation rubber costing only 2 marks per kilo, are still greater.* * * If you ask me t o answer you honestly and truly when synthetic rubber will bring the millions which prophets see in its exploitation, I must reply that I do not know. Surely not in the immediate future, although synthetic rubber will certainly appear on the market in a very short time. B u t I hope to live long enough to see Art triumph also here over Nature.
That his caution was justified is shown by the experience of the Germans, when they were cut off from sources of rubber and could not get it a t any price, were forced to fall back on very inadequate substitutes even for military purposes. The synthetic was found useful for hard rubber but unsatisfactory for the soft. But imperfect and unprofitable as synthetic rubber may be a t present we may still count it among the triumphs of chemistry, for as L. E. Weber puts it The synthesis of rubber constitutes the first and only natural organic colloid which it has been possible even remotely to duplicate even in the laboratory.
My own opinion expressed with due diffidence before an audience of experts is that the chemist is not so likely to make a synthetic product capable of competing with natural rubber as he is to make something better of a similar sort. It is merely our good luck when a plant happens to form some compound that we happen to find useful. We may be able to beat Nature in plastics as we have in dyes and drugs. Celluloid and Bakelite are not found in nature. The structure of the cocaine molecule has been worked out, yet we st’ill get cocaine from the coca leaf as did the pre-Columbian Peruvians but knowing how cocaine is made we now make novocaine which has more anesthetic power and less poisonous properties. After all, the rubber we use is not a natural but a truly synthetic product based upon the reaction that Goodyear discovered in 1839 and that nobody 1
THISJOURNAL, 18, 404 (1926).
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has yet been able to interpret-the process of vulcanization which came out of a dream and an accident combined by Yankee ingenuity and persistence. Colloid C h e m i s t r y of R u b b e r
The old domestic problem of “why the jelly will not jell,” which formerly broke the hearts of brides and drove husbands to strong drink, has recently been cleared up by colloid chemistry. The most inexperienced housewife can now be sure of making beautiful jelly out of the most recalcitrant fruits without soiling her dainty fingers or bringing a frown upon her fair brow. For proof of this see the advertisements in any ladies’ magazine. We can, therefore, hope that colloid chemistry will do as much for the perplexed rubber manufacturer. Formerly, I understand, the rubber man had nothing harder to do than to pick the stones out of the pella from Para. Nowadays, I see, he has to measure the anisotropic surface tensions of micellae, watch out for the Joule effect and make microscopic motion pictures of the Brownian movement. We ought to be able to understand colloids easily since we are colloids ourselves. But inorganic chemistry got the start of organic by a good hundred years and we still approach organic problems by the old inorganic route. What is called in the textbook “organic chemistry” is largely a misnomer, since it does not deal for the most part with organized chemical compounds or with the chemistry of organisms, but rather with the inorganic chemistry of carbon compounds some small fraction of which happened to have been formed by organisms. In our efforts a t interpreting a living plant we are as clumsy as a Diesel engine trying to explain an elephant. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes used to say that the fault of physiological chemistry was that it was studying fireworks on the fifth of July. Rubber’s C o n t r i b u t i o n to Human C o m f o r t s
There is no danger that the market for rubber will diminish in the future. On the contrary, its importance will augment with the advance of civilization, since the essential function of rubber is to counteract two of the undesirable features of machine civilization, noise and jar. These are, physiologically speaking, nervous irritants and disintegrating forces against which civilized men must increasingly and continuously combat. The purpose of rubber is to serve as a buffer. It takes up the shock and jolts and jars, it reduces the sound of clatter and noise. Rubber serves to prevent leakage in various ways, the leakage of rain to the skin and the leakage of electricity from the wire. This is a cushioning age. We demand springs and soft sittings. We seek for silence in a noisy age. Railroad trains are stopped without shock by air brakes using rubber hose. In the early days air was only used for breathing purposes. Later it was employed for feeding flames. Now we use it to support us in the airplane and pneumatic tire. This is the tire that prevents tire. Even better than air is a vacuum, a vacuum such as gives us the electric light and the radio concerts. We mould not know how to live today without the vacuum. I can remember the days when it was thought necessary to make the rim of a wagon and carriage wheel as hard as possible to prevent wear. Now we make it as soft as possible to prevent shock. A soft rubber tire with an aerial core is our idea of comfort. When I was a boy our heels and toes were reenforced with crescents of iron and copper. Now we wear rubber heels and soles. This is in line with the evolution which has taken place in the biological realm.
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Nature in her first attempts a t protecting her living creatures provided them with armor. The clam, the crustacean, and the beetle date from this primitive period when armor was in fashion. Rut in the course of many million years Nature found it better to reverse the system of construction and put the hard parts inside and clothe the skeleton with a cushion of flesh. Mark Twain in his list of epoch-making moments mentions that of “Howe, when the idea shot through his brain that for a hundred and twenty generations the eye had been bored through the wrong end of the needle.” So Nature discovered that for some 500 million years she had made the mistake of putting the skeleton on the wrong side of the body, and that it was safer to make it with the boneside inside and the skinside outside. Since then it has been considered better form in society to keep skeletons decently concealed. The dreadnought saurians and the ironclad insects and the hard-shelled mollusks have yielded supremacy to thin-skinned man. Our bones are now carefully enveloped in a cushion of flesh, to which some of the wiser of us add a thick layer of fat as a further protection against being bruised. The use of rubber as a covering and a cushion to absorb shock and reduce friction is in line with this same process of evolution. Such buffers will be more and more needed to counteract the stress and strain of modern life as civilization becomes more and more speedy and complex. Rubber chemists are to be congratulated on being in a profession which contributes so much to the comfort and convenience of humanity, which smooths the pathway of life and soothes the nerves. How much nicer this is than being a dentist or a tax-collector ! Rubber is a model substance. It possesses in a high degree the virtues which we human beings attain with difficulty. The quality of sticking together under strain is what makes a nation strong. Rubber rises after repression and shows amazing ability in the come-back. In fact, if I were to make a motto out of a material I should choose rubber as the ideal, for is there any temperamental virtue more admirable than resiliency?
The Significance of Cooperation The Raw Rubber Symposium affords a n excellent example of the resources of the Division of Rubber Chemistry. Following the joint meeting of the division with t h e ilkron Section of the AMERICAN CHBMICAL SOCIETYlast February, the division decided to undertake this timely discussion of a topic presenting so many angles as t o justify consideration on an international basis. The division was fortunate in securing the cooperation of men prominent in the work of foreign groups and in the production as well as the utilization of rubber. It has demonstrated its capacity t o arrange within a comparatively brief time for the presentation of such a mass of data as to guide those interested in a n estimation of the world situation. The symposium is a milestone in the growth of a division of the SOCIETY which, in a few years, has advanced from the status of a section uncertain in its work and future to one of the most active and constructive units in our national organization. It is cooperative work of this sort that has impressed the executives of the rubber industry so t h a t the participation of members of their staffs is now encouraged and the attendance of these men upon meetings of the division and its committees is facilitated. The growing interest in the support of research in certain branches of the industry may also be traced to the seed sown by the division in its several activities. The executives have come to realize the advantage from close contact with divisional activities. We may look forward t o the time when, even though unable t o participate in the discussions, men high in the production departments and sales divisions of the several companies will become members and regular attendants upon the sessions of the Division of Rubber Chemistry.
