RUBBER INDUSTRY

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 204, 26 May 1938, Page 7

RUBBER INDUSTRY

Fifty Years’ Growth

Manufacture of rubber goods was the subject of a film which Jicid the attention of an .udience for two and a half hours between the regular sessions at the Regent Theatre last evening. Entitled “The Romance of the Tyre Industry,’’ it has been produced to celebrate’tbe fiftieth anniversary of the invention of the pneumatic tyre by J. B. Dunlop, which falls this month. Frankly a publicity film, it concentrated attention on the organisation that has grown up from the seed planted when the Dublin veterinary surgeon made a better tyre than a crude solid rubber ring for his son’s tricycle, but the organisation is so',great and its work so interesting that it would be a churlish person who did not find it interesting, especially when presented with all the skill of the cinemtaographic artist, as this film has been produced. The ramifications of such an industry are extraordinary. The audience was shown all sorts of curious processes, starting with the germination of the rubber tree seeds in 'the company’s Malayan plantations. It would bo tedious to detail in print even the products that come from the company’s factories, much more so to describe , the manufacturing processes, but the film story of the conversion of the tree sap into manufactured products is fascinating on 'the screen. It is interesting to learn, for instance, that liquid latex, the raw material of the rubber industry, is transported in tank wagons and tank ships from the tropics to the centre of England, and that tennis balls are inflated by placing inside each during manufacture a piece of solid chemical which gasifies when the balls are put in an oven. The film opened with a re-enactment, not without humour, of the historic cycle race in Dublin in which Dunlop’s invention was used for the first time, with tremendous success.