Everyone knows rubber. It's a very common material, with flexible, sometimes soft products made from rubber being present in almost every aspect of our lives. So it's worth learning a little more about this familiar yet special material. In today's part of our series on our materials - the steel and the aluminium after - the story of rubber.
Discovering the rubber
The name rubber is derived directly from the Latin gummi and the Greek kommi (κόμμι = latex, glue), but originally it was Egyptian and meant honey.
The raw material is rubber, which is the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) nedve. As its Latin name suggests, this tropical plant is native to South America. Rubberwood requires an annual mean temperature of more than 25 °C and 1000-1500 mm of rainfall per year, which limits its area of production.
The discovery of rubber as a raw material for gum dates back to pre-Maya times. Between 1500-500 BC on the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, representatives of an ancient culture in the jungle, the olmecs they lived.
The meaning of their name: rubber people or, in other translations, inhabitants of the „rubber land”. They were the ones who discovered that the resinous sap of the rubber trees in the jungle could be kneaded into elastic balls.
The the ball game called ulama was already known in the Aztec Empire, which was played in a stone arena and required players to pass a solid rubber ball into a ring. Interestingly, the use of hands and feet was forbidden during the game, the ball was pushed forward with the hips, according to sources.
The spread of the new material
A Spanish and Portuguese conquerors first discovered and then dominated a very large part of the South American continent, so that, like precious metals or even cocoa, rubber reached Europe through them.
Spanish historian Munoz describes how Columbus' rich cargo included mastic resin, the ancestor of today's chewing gum.
The first written record of the rubber tree dates back to 1516. De Orbe Novo (The New Town) mentions a tree called Hevea, whose sap was used by the natives to waterproof clothes, blankets, boats, insulation and footwear.
But the real discovery of rubber trees was more than two hundred years in the making: an expedition to the Inca Empire in 1735 was how its members discovered this curious material. The Inca name for the rubber tree was „cahuchu”, meaning „succulent tree”, hence the name kaucsuk. One of the members of the expedition, Charles Marie Condamine, sent the first rubber specimen to Europe.
The exciting new material immediately captured the imagination of some researchers and they started experimenting with it. The English In 1770, Priestley discovered that rubber could also be used to erase. Hence the English name rubber, meaning rubbing.
Recovery of rubber
The extraction of the sap from the rubber tree is done by the bark of the tree is cut through and a vessel is fixed under the incision. Into this flows the thick, milky sap of the wood, the natural latex.
For the extraction of rubber wild trees were first used, but as the rubber tree was first tapped at around 6 years old and the boom in the rubber industry meant that more and more rubber was needed, the first plantations appeared in Brazil in the 19th century.
A latex but not yet the rubber we know, only its raw material. In our next article we will look at the process of rubber production.
