The reign of rubber

Front matter

4 '^ th«^

I

Glass.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

' I The Evolution of an Industry 3

II Problems of a Pioneer 18

Chapter I The Evolution Of An Industry

My purpose in writing this book is to confess to you who employ rubber goods in any way, who take home from shop or store the water-bottle, the garden-hose, or the tire, something of the successes, failures, limitations, and hopes of those whose lives are spent in the creation of rubber products. Mystery has surrounded rubber factories; secretiveness has been the watchword; the methods of manufacture have been little revealed.

But the old days of competitive reticence are past. Because, perhaps, of the harmony engendered of the World War, rubber men are more friendly with each other. Exchange of ideas has been found of mutual value. Research in each of the many units of the rubber industry has developed to the point where it may be said that there are few secrets left. Thus the time has now come when the makers should take their friends, the users of rubber products, into their confidence.

I shall be most happy if from this effort may come to you a clearer understanding of rubber commodities, and a warmer sympathy toward the active participants in this fundamental industry.

We live in a world of things and forces, in which things are the visible evidences of ideas, and forces are the means through which the creation of things is accomplished. Down through the ages men have struggled, thought, studied, tortured, and bled to gain control of forces, that their children might have things of comfort. The American loves his New York, the Enghshman his London, the Frenchman his Paris; for in them he finds the things which satisfy. Late in the afternoon an observer upon the corner of one of the crowded thoroughfares of these great cities may find much of interest. The day is done. The workers (are not we all such?) hasten to the streets — the banker into the limousine; the clerk, after a purchase or two, into the bus, the underground, or the subway; the young bridegroom, with eager face — rushes off to take advantage of the fastest transport available. Men go to the one place for which the things of life are created — home. Each carries with him things made in the industries which supply directly or indirectly products rendering life happy and comfortable. So intent are we each day to leave business for home that we rarely stop to delve into the reasons for our possession of the necessary comforts of civilization. The sources of our food, the origin of our clothing, even the roofs over our heads, are taken for granted. If the trolley fails to run, if the electric light goes out, we blame the public service corporation. A dead telephone may mean a late dinner; a blown-out tire requires hard work, and we in these days are too little used to it. The luxuries of yesterday have become the necessities of to-day, but they have come into use too rapidly to permit a real acquaintance. The things of rubber have become essential to the activities of life because of the valuable services they render. Without them our daily affairs would be strikingly different.

The many enterprises which collectively compose the vast rubber industry rose from small beginnings in years so recent and into ramifications so numerous that our modern world may truly be said to be under the reign of rubber. The ruler of the realm is, in democratic fashion, the servant, not the master. The products serve, but do not dominate.

The substance used to produce these various articles was made known to Europeans by the explorers of the Americas. When Columbus landed in the West Indies, he set men at work chopping trees. How our forefathers did love to chop trees! Certain of these trees oozed a white milk from the cut bark. Columbus remarked upon this. Later, in 1525, Spaniards in South America observed the natives playing with a ball made of a black substance, left when this milk was evaporated. Because of the wealth of unusual substances brought back to Europe by these explorers, it is not singular, perhaps, that one of them, from the weeping tree, should have afforded nothing of value during more than two hundred years.

The South American Indians went on with their ball play. Politics and wars absorbed the Europeans, until during the later eighteenth century samples of this weeping-tree product found their way into England. Now, the Englishman has ever been a person of imagination, with zest to search out the new and unusual. Therefore he studied the new American product in laboratory and office. With his commercial instinct, he placed pieces of it on sale. These attracted the attention of Dr. Joseph Priestley. This famous chemist, clergyman, teacher, author, who discovered ''dephlogisticated air," — afterward named oxygen, — wrote the following notice appended to the preface of his ''Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective," printed in 1770: ''Since this work was printed off, I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the marks of a black-lead pencil. It must, therefore, be of singular use to those who practise drawing. It is sold by Mr. Nairne, Mathematical Instrument Maker, opposite the Royal Exchange. He sells a cubical piece of about half an inch for three shillings ; and he says it will last several years. ' ' The French had called this substance caoutchouc, which was as close as they could come to caa o-chu, meaning "weeping tree." Priestley did not name it, but the men in the art shops christened it, in true colloquial English, "rubber" because it rubbed out pencil marks, and "Indian" because of its origin in the West Indies. But three shillings for a half of a cubic inch! It is the highest known recorded price for raw rubber. Would not our friends the ovmers of plantations rock with joy could they charge that price to-day when a bit less than two cubic inches brings but one cent?

Ideas arise from observation of objects. Some men seej but do not gain thoughts or stimulus to imagination from the things before them. Here was something new — a firm, elastic substance from a country of dreams. It was not soluble in water. Stories of cloth waterproofed by the milk poured on and dried, had filtered through to England and France. French chemists undertook the first chemical study of the material; for, as in the case of all our modern rubber and industrial problems, research must ever precede production. And the play of genius in bringing forth ideas began. With characteristic energy, the English people went forward most actively. Exactly where, when, and how the first rubber factory 'of the world started seems to be in some dispute, although it is stated that in 1803 rubber thread for use in suspenders had been invented by an Austrian in the suburbs of St. Denis, near Paris.

Whether the purpose was the making of thread to hold up the trousers of marikind or the making of water-proof garments, the first books on the rubber industry do not seem to agree. We do know that the English were early the most successful manufacturers, and that the first practical articles were clothing and shoes. Many were the difficulties, uncertain the results.

The names of Charles Mackintosh and Thomas Hancock are names ever to be remembered, because of their extreme activity in building up the industry. Discovering the solubility of rubber in various solvents and producing air-tight materials by ''proofing" fabric, they made pillows, air mattresses, and life-preservers. Although as early as 1791 the Englishman Samuel Peal had constructed waterproofed clothing with a single layer of fabric and a rubber layer on the outside, he made no success. In 1823, however, Mackintosh overcame some of the difficulties. He invented what was known as double-texture clothing, and the * 'mackintosh" came into being. The mackintosh was popular among men who rode on top of the English coach. Things progressed swimmingly in England; Mackintosh's factory grew. Hancock was an indefatigable inventor. He went on with the making of hose, bumpers, carriage tires, and a large number of other products. Rain-coats were shipped to America. Rubber overshoes made on the Amazon River were sent to Europe and America. The first rubber to be imported into Boston was a rubber bottle from the Amazon. S. C. Smith & Sons of New York were the first firm in the business of dealing in rubber goods, and the Roxbury India Rubber Co. of Roxbury, Massachusetts, which was started in 1832 by John Haskins and Edward M. Chaffee, was the first to manufacture these rubber products in this country. Popular indeed were the rubber products. A rubber boom had begun.

But there was a fly in the ointment; for this rubber, though water-proof and moldable into many shapes, possessed a basic fault. The rain-coats hardened in cold weather, so that the poor consumer felt himself encased as in tin armor; in the summer the rubber softened with the heat, melted, and fell apart.

Many efforts were made to dry up the rubber and prevent this stickiness and also to overcome the effect of oil and grease, but without success. So completely had rubber goods failed the American people because of warm summers and cold winters, that down to about 1840 they were filled with dislike for anything that related to ' ' gum elastic. ' ' People had become disgusted and rightly so with goods that hardened like a rock in winter and melted in summer. Even body temperature melted the threads in suspenders, and wearers of the celebrated mackintosh had to keep away from a fire or find their rain-coats oozing from them. The only reliable articles were Indian-made shoes from* the Amazon. Large quantities of clothing, mail-bags, and other water-proof articles melted, decomposed, and were returned. Therefore resentment followed favor, and the rubber bubble burst.

Such conditions could not persist in connection with so flexible a substance. Men may come and companies go, but ideas grow in the minds of other men, who form new companies to carry on. Charles Goodyear, of New Haven, Connecticut, conceived it possible to dry up this sticky, melting, freezing material. Finally after years of effort, in 1839, he made a far-reaching discovery. He heated a mixture of sulphur, white lead, and raw rubber, and he observed a marked change of properties. This erstwhile softish, doughy substance became firm, and strong; it no longer hardened in cold weather or melted in the summer.

Even in the face of trials, failures, and discouragements, there are always a few men with vision enough to see and to support a new idea. So a factory was started in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1841, to carry out Goodyear 's idea. Here began the real rubber industry; for 'vulcanization, as this process of heating with sulphur was termed, is the one essential process even to-day. Without vulcanization, rubber as we know it would not be possible.

A little later, in England, and by wholly different means of experiment, Thomas Hancock in 1843 discovered the same characteristic displayed by sulphur and rubber ; thus about simultaneously in England and America the modern manufacture of rubber goods began. A complete change had been brought about by Goodyear — a basic process discovered. How he did it and what he did are left for a later chapter. Yet so fundamental was this effect, and so intense his activity that for twenty-five years, from 1835, the history of the rubber industry is little else than the personal history of Charles Goodyear. An industry based upon a far-reaching idea now took shape. These enterprises that men create measure their periods by ideas and grow with mankind, provided the products they offer render useful service. Rubber could now capably serve ; therefore growth was a natural consequence.

It is strange how men strive to reap where others sowed. I shall not here discuss Goodyear 's troubles. Some men were pirates. His patent was infringed, but finally sustained. Then came many companies. Boots and shoes claimed almost exclusive attention of inventors and organizers for years.

The first rubber overshoes delivered into this country, in 1800, were made by the Indians on the banks of the Amazon River ; but to-day the old shoes have given way to the new, and we are protected from the weather by ** rubbers." Rubber boots have come to be a part of the fisherman's outfit, and short ones are used by lumbermen; the liveliness of our tennis matches is in no small part due to the flexibility, lightness, and firm grip of the rubber-soled tennis-shoe. Through vulcanization, rain-coats have changed from tin armor in winter and the melted clothing in summer to a permanent, light, flexible, water-proof, useful commodity.

In 1858 the trade in rubber products amounted to between four and five miUion dollars annually, and ten thousand men were engaged in the enterprise. The Eoxbury company was reincorporated as the Goodyear Manufacturing Co., later to become, as it is still called, the Boston Belting Co.

There were many keen men of high purpose and a few pirates. But some notable companies were formed, and many of them are still producing. Three great rubber manufacturing centers slowly developed. There was the New England district where Goodyear began, and the New Jersey centers where several footwear factories began. A number of these companies combined in 1892 to form the United States Rubber Co. The district of Akron, Ohio, began in an equally small way in 1870. The start resulted from the belief in rubber of Dr. B. F. Goodrich and the enterprise of the business men of the district.

Were I at this point to trace the history of rubber goods development, the reader would observe a profusion of inventions offered to the Patent Office; and, characteristically, many of them were ahead of their time. Ideas were written down, disclosed, or kept secret; but no use was found for them until decades later.

Up to 1879, however, the industry strengthened; the value of the products amounted in that year to $25,310,000. It was truly an era of inventions and business development, for this chemical change called vulcanization had succeeded in making rubber sufficiently permanent to warrant labor by inventive genius here and abroad in the creation of articles.

In this period were developed the conveyor belts, which to-day are hundreds of feet long, serving to carry ore from crushers to furnaces for a large number of different purposes. These, together with the elevator belts, have become as essential a part of mining operations as the crushing machinery used in reducing ore to a state ready for furnaces. Rubber has paralleled other inventions. To-day, in the trains which carry us from point to point rapidly and safely, we find rubber in the insulated wire for the lighting, in the air brake, and in the steam-hose between the cars themselves.

The ''hose pipe" invented by Hancock in England to replace the old leather hose for breweries has come down to us through this creative stage, and now the fire-hose has become a most essential development. We might well stop to think what would happen when fire-engines go shrieking down the street if there were no vulcanized rubber in the hose so necessary in the distribution of water to the conflagration. Fire prevention is one thing ; but when a fire is started, hose that will not burst is an essential feature for rapid extinction.

One need not run through a catalogue to show how these early ideas have been carried down and improved

THE EVOLUTION OF AN INDUSTEY 13

for our use ; that will be done with more detail in later chapters. I wish merely to anticipate and to mention, further, how large a part is played by rubber in sport, with its base-balls, golf -balls, tennis-balls, and billiard cushions; how in the home, floor-coverings, jar rings, garden-hose, fountain-pens, and other articles make life more comfortable. Even in 1899, these articles were so numerous that the indu'stry had grown to the stature of $49,212,000 in the value of products.

In 'about that period began a noticeably rapid change. Since nothing has quite so greatly stimulated the imagination of business men as the possibilities of the automobile, there is no period of the rubber industry quite so filled with competition and with bubbles that have been blown and burst as the period from 1899 to the present time.

When you drive your automobile into the mountains, you give little attention to the part that rubber is playing in making your trip interesting and comfortable. If, however, a tire blows out and you are found fifteen miles from the nearest service station, you consider how necessary a commodity rubber has become at least to that particular expedition.

The rubber-tire part of the industry is now a giant ; it serves to carry ten million automobiles upon forty million tires. Figures now astonish us, particularly as we look back and mark the change after even this short period of seventy-five years; for in 1914 the value of the products of the rubber industry had jumped to $300,994,000, and it produced in 1919 products to the value of $1,138,216,000, made by 475 factories.

This is the period of Akron's rapid advance. The enterprise of her business men expanded the B. F. Goodrich Co., and organized in 1898 the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and in 1900 the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., each of which has now grown to tremendous size, until into this city, to be used by over twenty rubber companies, comes more than one third of the total raw rubber consumed in the world.

During these stages of development the industry prepared for the world war, into which it threw itself with whole-hearted abandon. It is strange how war reacts upon the soldier in the interests of a common cause. The sensitiveness and secretiveness of youth gave way before the broader views of maturity. Competitive strife disappeared ; the units of this maturing industry made balloons and compared notes upon the methods of construction. And it was rubber between two plies of thin fabric that held the hydrogen and kept the balloons aloft. Even in the big guns rubber gaskets were necessary in the recoil mechanism. The hospitals performed wonderful service, and rubber gloves, catheters, tubing, and water-bottles greatly assisted the skilled surgeons in the care of the wounded. Possibly the most notable service performed by rubber products lay in the gas-m*ask development — a romance in itself. The gas mask bids fair to become a defensive commodity of the greatest moment in the future.

You may find this industrial man not quite "the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lin'd," as after a large Thanksgiving dinner. We all enjoyed in the year 1919 the comfortable feeling of satiation. We have suffered the indigestion of youth from overindulgence. Money flowed into buildings and materials ; however, that stage of growth is happily passing. The factories are ably managed, they have survived the shock of depression, and they go forward to a greater service to mankind.

The rubber industry is distinct in its principles of manufacture from any other. We are familiar with the metal group, such as steel and copper, in which chemical changes are brought about upon mineral ores, by "Which one substance at a time, such as iron, copper, or zinc, is produced. We know that each of them goes to the world in a variety of forms. This group is different from leather, for in that industry an animal product is altered by chemical change in a way that produces a tougher and more serviceable commodity, which later is worked up into a variety of forms. The manifold uses of cotton and the textiles come about from the mechanical purification of vegetable products and the weaving of them into sheets from which artisans create final forms without alteration of the substance which they modify. The great chemical industry, with its dye-stuffs, its caustic soda and sulphuric acid, its nitrogen products, begins its operations with two or more fundamental materials ; and by the proper relations of time ; temperature, and concentration it brings forth to us a great variety of new, different, and pure substances, each of which, as such, is used in a multitude of different ways.

The rubber industry is peculiar in that it brings together a large number of different animal, vegetable, mineral, and chemical materials. It chooses a number of these to be scientifically acted upon mechanically to produce a mixture. It then forms those mechanical mixtures into the approximate shape of a new and useful commodity. This then is heated to bring about the chemical change, vulcanization. As a result of vulcanization, each of these articles is capable of service.

Since by common practice the word ''rubber" is not used in its original meaning, as describing th6 product from a tree, there has arisen a confusion in terminology. Most books and articles upon this subject have begun the story with a description of the preparation of the raw product, the early word for which technically came from the Indian term for the tree: caa^ meaning wood, and o-chu, meaning to weep ; hence, the word ' ' caoutchouc. " It is probably the rapid growth of caoutchouc products, called rubber before the discovery of vulcanization, which has led to the confusion ; for to-day we speak of rubber products which have been vulcanized as "rubber." We also speak of rubber as meaning the raw unvulcanized material. Technically, therefore, ' ' caoutchouc ' ' means raw rubber; and "rubber" to-day means vulcanized rubber. Throughout this book the meaning will be evident in each case.

The rubber industry usually groups its products under the names : mechanical rubber goods, tires, footwear, clothing and proofed materials, druggists' sundries, and hard rubber. These classes will not be discussed, but rather the story will be written about certain particular ones, representative of the classes most frequently known and used. Each has a story

THE EVOLUTION OP AN INDUSTRY 17

of its own ; each is interwoven with a romantic history from the old days down to the present.

Since raw rubber exists in a variety of forms and comes from a large number of different places in the world, since also its method of preparation and the story of its growth are chapters by themselves, since, likewise, vulcanization is the one fundamental process necessary to an understanding of the industry as^it now exists, I shall not follow the order of chronology, but plunge at once into a discussion of the fundamental processes which have made the rubber industry possible. This will give us a basis of understanding, and the series of short stories of different rubber products will assume that the idea of vulcanization is known to the reader.

Chapter II

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see the things that stare us in the face until the hour when the mind is ripened.

— Emerson.

The struggles of inventors in attempts so to change the properties of raw rubber as to avoid hardening in winter and softening in summer are truly the stories of men who burned their fingers without realizing that fire was the cause. Several of them were close to the solution of the problem, and yet they passed it by. Their failures make one believe that ''our eyes are holden that we cannot see" until discoveries may properly coordinate with others.

A knife cut into the bark of certain evergreen tropical trees permits a milky sap to flow. It looks like the juice of a milkweed or a dandelion. When it dries, there is left a brownish mass of a firm, tough substance. This is the same stuff that came to Priestley's laboratory and was called "Indian rubber." Frenchmen brought it to Europe, where many enterprising Englishmen studied it and the great Faraday analyzed it. Germans experimented. Thomas Hancock writes in 1856: "It is a singular fact that although this substance had attracted the notice of chemists from the earliest date of its importation into Europe, they failed to discover any means of manufacturing it into solid masses or to facilitate its solution.'^ That is a damaging arraignment of chemistry, but we must remember that the era of the chemical engineer had not arrived. In those days the chemist was an analyst whose chief aim in life was to find out what things were made of, not to develop their uses.

The grand old man of rubber, Thomas Hancock, owned^a private laboratory. Not satisfied with a day 's work, he studied at home by night. He dissolved rubber in turpentine, and made many rubber articles. Charles Mackintosh, in 1823, at Glasgow, invented a process for spreading a rubber solution on two pieces of fabric and bringing them together under pressure ; he thus created the double-texture, water-proof garment known even to-day as the mackintosh. Hancock developed a machine for softening raw rubber. He called it a "masticator," and his first experimental machine held one pound. He invented iron molds ; and, with a brick oven constructed by a bakery-oven builder, he formed blocks of rubber under heat and pressure. A little later, in 1822, he developed steam-heated vessels and, several years after, a masticator capable of holding two hundred pounds. It is fate that heat was used by him, and that a little later sulphur played its part, but that he did not connect the two. In his most interesting description called ''Personal Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or India- Rubber Manufacture in England," there were many difficulties and handicaps mentioned.

Hancock, hoAvever, was a business man. Despite the losses and the worries suffered through the effect of light in decomposing the caoutchouc, he continued to invent new uses for rubber and patented them. He made artificial leather by a combination of cotton and other fibers in a rubber mixture. Much trouble was occasioned when the tailors sewed rubberized garments together, for water crept through the holes made by the needles. Then, too, because the grease in the woolen cloth was absorbed into the raw rubber and destroyed it, many were returned. Hancock was fortunate in living in England with its equable climate; for the heat was not great in summer, or was the cold severe in winter. Consequently, the numerous products from his real inventive genius did not seriously interrupt his profits.

I have wondered why he did not employ a research laboratory. Although research in those days was not conceived of as in our generation, he was so far ahead of others that he might well have begun the practice. He may have reasoned, though, in the way many of our modern business men do, who seem to feel it advisable to reduce the appropriation for research laboratories during periods of depression. As a result, discoveries have been delayed and opportunities lost because of the lack of a little money expended for research at the right time.

Hancock was on the verge of a great discovery, but he lacked just the necessary something possessed by another. While Hancock worked in England, there was some activity in America. In 1833, in consequence of goods returned because they had melted in the heat of summer, the Eoxbury India Rubber Co. was on the verge of dissolution. The firm had sent out products with nothing done to prove their value except the test of actual service ; it has taken years to develop in the minds of men the fact that in fairness to the consumer tests of quality should precede sale. In the hot rains of August, rain-coats oozed rubber, while mail-bags fell apart, and letters were scattered. During zero weather the shoes sent from the Amazon became wooden, like the ''klomps" of Holland. An unreliable article was the suspender in those days ; perhaps that is why Americans came to prefer the belt to ''galluses."

One day Charles Goodyear of New Haven, Connecticut, a man of thirty-three, passed by the New York store of the Roxbury company. He was not a business man, for he had failed in the hardware and farm implement business. He saw some life preservers. Because he could not help inventing, he designed a new one and returned a few months later to submit his sample to the clerk in the store. The clerk, wishing to do the enterprising Goodyear a service, confided to him the troubles of the Roxbury company. Placing a difficulty in the way of a genius creates the stimulus that ever has brought forth latent activity. Goodyear set to work. Cast into prison for debt, he shaped small test samples of raw rubber with a rolling-pin from the family kitchen. He mixed rubber with lampblack, magnesia, and turpentine. With true research spirit, he submitted each of his mixtures to a weathering test in the open air.

A ''presentiment of the future" spurred him on, until he became shabby and emaciated. His hands and clothing seemed to be covered continually with India rubber, and many of his friends tried to dissuade him by telling him that the India rubber business was now below par. At this time some one in New York was asked how he might recognize Mr. Goodyear. The reply was: "If you meet a man who has 051 an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and shoes, with an India rubber purse without a cent of money in it, that is he. ' ' The friends who had backed him were ruined in the panic of 1836-37. By treating caoutchouc with nitric acid, he nearly suffocated himself in 1837. But nothing can stop genius.

When the officials of the Roxbury company offered to help him with the use of the machinery at their plant, he removed to Roxbury. Although his inventive genius was used in the production of better articles, the thought of using sulphur did not occur until 1838, when he became acquainted with Nathaniel Hayward of Woburn, Massachusetts, who was the foreman of the factory of a rubber company that had just failed. Hayward was a practical man. He had approached the discovery of vulcanization, but he had not found it. His contribution to Goodyear was a process for partly hardening rubber by spreading a small quantity of sulphur over the surface of the raw rubber article. Then the mixture was put in the sun to dry. His patent, which was taken out in 1839, was purchased by Goodyear; and Goodyear used it in the manufacture of life-preservers.