RUBBER FROM ROCKS

Taranaki Daily News, 19 July 1929, Page 5

RUBBER FROM ROCKS

A NEW ACHIEVEMENT. The. chemist now proposes, with a wave of his test tube, to convert rocks into rubber as the latest step in the development of synthetic sources of this raw material, says the Christian Science Alonitor - Ever since the industrial world caught the first glimpse of the importance of rubber, research specialists refused to accept the conclusion that rubber could only come from a tree. German chemists succeeded in making it out of coal. And now an American firm expects to extract rubber from siiale’oil in commercial quantities. Some time ago a geologist discovered a peculiar shale formation near Elsinore, California. He submitted samples to A. R. Lendner. a chemist who had given 60 years of effort to shale oil research. They found that the shale contained the basic elements of rubber.

The Delaware Shale Rubber Products Company has been organised to make rubber from these deposits. It is headcd by Iking C» Gillette, r<izor nitinufacturer. The process to be used is to crush the shale and then run it through a specially constructed retort. The resultant product, t'he chemists hold, shows a greater tendency to resist abrasion that natural rubber. The .ost of the process was said’.to compare favourably with the production of natural rubber. Further refinements of the German process for producing rubber from coal also are under way. The process originally was developed through experiments conducted in the Silesian Coal Research Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, of Breslau, Germany. It marked the culmination of research, under way in Europe for more than 30 years. Paralleling the chemical studies to make rubber from shale and from coal are the efforts to increase the supplies of raw material through the use oi plants other than the rubber tree itself.