VULCANISING OF RUBBER

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23587, 14 March 1942, Page 8

VULCANISING OF RUBBER

♦ DISCOVERY OF PROCESS

The old household remedy, sulphur and treacle, probably played an important part in the discovery of the method of vulcanising rubber, according to Mr J. G. Power, who explained the process when he conducted the Mayor (Mr E. H. Andrews) and representatives of "The Press’’ on a tour of factories pi'oducing gas masks in Christchurch.

“We have just celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the discovery of vulcanising,” Mr Power said. “Charles Goodyear, who had been experimenting in America for years, at last discovered the secret in 1841. He had rubber stewing on the kitchen stove, and his wife had some concoction that was probably a mixture of sulphur and treacle cooking: each boiled over, and the result was such a hard and solid mess that Goodyear’s wife demanded he should remove it. Goodyear thus discovered by accident that sulphur was the essential ingredient in the process of so hardening and solidifying rubber that it_ would no longer melt in the sun or in heat. Ho named the new process'" after the ancient classical god of fire. Vulcan.” _ Mr Power explained that Nortn American Indians used some form of rubber footwear in the fifteenth century, but that they could not stop the rubber from becoming sticky in hot weather. In the same way, he said, Englishmen who tried to make money out of the rubber plantations of Singapore. which were begun from seedlings raised In Kew Gardens, were at the same disadvantage until they could vulcanise rubber and so make it durable in all weathers.