THE USES OF RUBBER.

Clutha Leader, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 22, 19 September 1911, Page 7

THE USES OF RUBBER.

FACTOR IN MODERN LIFE. RECORD OF PROGRESS. What would modern life be without the use of rubber? A writer in the London 'Times' writ, ing on the wonderful record of progress shown at the Rubber Exhibition at Islington, as compared with that held in 1908 recalls that in that year he expressed the wonder how it was that mankind in the past had ever been able to exist without indiarubber, and the more we reflect upon this question and see all the varied and useful manufactures brought together on this second occasion the- more firmly do wc feel convinced that life without rubber would indeed be a blank, at any rate in a civilised community.

It seems a far cry from the rude elastic "gum ball" of the Indians in Haiti at the time of the first landing of Columbus to the gaily-painted top in our English nurseries, but within this compass we have the whole range of the history of indiarubber brought vividly before us. Many" Notable Inventions

had to be performed before the crude rubber of the savage became transformed into the vulcanised substance used for our modern playthings, and these evolutions are fully elucidated at tho present exhibition. It may confidently te claimed that the entire industrial development of the use of indiarubber has l>ecome possible through the inventions of Goodyear in the United States in 1839 and of Hancock in England in 1844. The discoveries of these two men were apparently quite independent, hut they enabled rubber, treated with sulphur, to be employed for a wide range of purposes, and practically laid the foundation for the whole modern system of using this material. We find, moreover, that within the brief period of a decade Mighty Changes Have Been Effected in the source of our rubber supplies and in the method of preparing tho raw substance for use, cultivated rubber threatening to take the place of the wild forest tree formerly employed. Then came about the formation of numerous plantation companies in the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, Southern India and throughout the Middle East, followed by the truly wonderful "rubber boom," during which prices of the raw material reached five times the value at the period of a former crisis. It cannot be said that the increased price of rubber was responsible for the movement in favor of planting the "Hevea." Experts had long predicted the speedy exhaustion of the South American and African sources of (supply and almost at the same time rumors were rife concerning the probable nature of the yield from rubber plantations.

Some of the assurances of the company promoter were indeed magnificent but it soon transpired that profits of 200 and even 300 per cent, were being realised by those who had been early in the field in the rubber-planting movement. Then the Public Ftfll Over One Another

in their eagerness to invest in the new Golconda, with the result that estates, good, bad and indifferent, were sold for rubber plantations, many of them at greatly inflated prices. As Sir Henry Blake truly states in his introduction to the catalogue of the present exhibition, many millions of pounds have been invested in rubber since 1908, and it is not difficult to believe that the shareholders in the new companies will be disposed to learn all that they can about the product upon which they have staked so much wealth and about the machinery used in its manufacture.

In the various collections brought together in the Agricultural Hall it becomes possible to study the behvwiour of the latex from the moment it flows from the incision in the tree stem down to the time when, in the form of sheets, cakes or blocks, it leaves the plantation for shipment to the manufacturer in some far-off land; then to trace its conversion into vulcanised rubber for use in a tbcrusand different ways.