The Romance of Rubber

The Romance of Rubber

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Romance of Rubber, by John
Martin (Ed.) Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to
check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or
redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: The Romance of Rubber
Author: John Martin (Ed.)
Release Date: December, 2003 [EBook #4759] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 13,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
ROMANCE OF RUBBER ***

Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.

THE ROMANCE OF RUBBER
EDITED BY JOHN MARTIN
EDITOR OF JOHN MARTIN'S BOOK THE CHILD'S MAGAZINE
PUBLISHED BY UNITED STATES RUBBER COMPANY

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE
We have undertaken to print this booklet, telling you how rubber is
grown, gathered, and then made useful, for this reason:
The United States Rubber Company, as the largest rubber manufacturer
in the world, wants the coming generations of our country to have some
understanding of the importance of rubber in our every day life.
We hope to interest and inform you. We believe the rubber industry
will be better off if the future citizens of our country know more about
it.

CHAPTER 1
THE DISCOVERY
If you were asked, "What did Columbus discover in 1492?" you would
have but one answer. But what he discovered on his second voyage is
not quite so easy to say. He was looking for gold when he landed on the
island of Hayti on that second trip. So his eyes were blind to the
importance of a simple game which he saw being played with a ball
that bounced by some half-naked Indian boys on the sand between the
palm trees and the sea. Instead of the coveted gold, he took back to
Europe, just as curiosities, some of the strange black balls given him by

these Indian boys. He learned that the balls were made from the
hardened juice of a tree.
The little boys and girls of Spain were used to playing with balls made
of rags or wool, so you may imagine how these bouncing balls of the
Indians must have pleased them. But the men who sent out this second
expedition gave the balls little thought and certainly no value. Since
Columbus brought back no gold, he was thrown into prison for debt,
and he never imagined that, four hundred years later, men would turn
that strange, gummy tree juice into more gold than King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella and all the princes of Europe ever dreamed of.
In the next century after Columbus's travels the Portuguese founded the
colony of Brazil on the continent of South America. Their settlements
were near the coast and they did not begin to explore the great Amazon
region for a hundred years or so. The journey down this great
river--which Theodore Roosevelt took so many years later--was first
made by a Portuguese missionary, who found the same kind of gummy
tree juice as that of the West Indies. But the natives along the Amazon
had discovered that besides being elastic it was waterproof, and they
were making shoes that would keep out water. You can picture a native
boy spilling some of this liquid on his foot, then covering it, as he
might with a mud pie, and when it dried wiggling his toes to find that,
he had the first and perhaps the best fitting gum shoe that ever was
made.
Little by little samples of this new substance found their way to Europe.
It was another hundred years before thoughtful men believed it worth
while to investigate this gum. In 1731 the Paris Academy of Science
sent some explorers to learn about it. One of these Frenchmen, La
Condamine, wrote of a tree called "Hevea" [Footnote: Hevea is
pronounced Hee'-vee-uh. Caoutchouc is pronounced koo'-chook.]
"There flows from this tree a liquor which hardens gradually and
blackens in the air." He found the people of Quito waterproofing cloth
with