The word «rubber» in the language of Amazon’s Indians is pronounced like «cao-choo» and means «tears of tree». Many years after Columbus is voyages, Europeans visiting America became acquainted with rubber, by learning how to saturate theirк raincoats with juice of a rubber-bearing tree like local people did. But in the Old World rubber appeared only in 1751 when mathematician Charles La Kondamin brought a small piece of the stark juice back to Europe. He studied his trophy for a long time but with no idea what benefit it could bring him personally or mankind as a whole. The rubber had no properties except elasticity, so the mathematician named the American elastic mass as a gum-eraser and forgot about it. Only 20 years later a chemist found an application for this stark juice.

In 1770 the English priest and chemist Joseph Priestley noticed that rubber can erase records made with a pencil. At this time Joseph Priestley was busy writing a big treatise «The appeal to the serious and fair professors of Christianity» and investigating the role of carbonic gas in plants breathing. During this period Priestly discovered by chance that natural raw rubber is able to erase traces of graphite better than pieces of bread that were used at that time. The advantage of rubber is that its friction on paper produces electrostatic voltage which makes particles of rubber and particles of graphite gravitate. Priestley named this substance «the Indian rubber» because the origin of rubber was America and all American things were named Indian that is why this inaccurate name remains to this day.

However experiments with rubber continued. When the Scottish chemist Charles Mackintosh soiled either his jacket or his trousers with it, it appeared that his soiled clothes achieved water-proof properties. Thus a rubberized raincoat was born named «mackintosh» after its inventor. However «the Scottish raincoat» had some problems. The natural rubber lost elasticity in the cold and softened in the heat, becoming sticky and smelly.

When the English shoemaker Rilli started to produce rubber footwear, his goods aroused great interest at first. But when the summer sun warmed up, the boots and galoshes on the shelves of his store melted. Despite Rilly’s failure, the American Charles Goodyear continued this business. Although he was poor, he worked tirelessly to domesticate rubber. One industrialist became very interested in the experiments of this self-educated inventor and decided to find him. He asked Goodyear’s neighbors about him and they answered: «if you meet a person in a rubber cap, trousers, a frock coat, a cape, boots and a rubber purse without any money, it will be Goodyear». Despite this funny description Goodyear revolutionized the manufacturing of rubber products. In 1843 he was granted a patent on the vulcanization of rubber which is a special process of incorporating of rubber and sulfur to enable rubber to avoid a prop in temperature.

As you can see many interesting historical persons studied rubber and we should be grateful especially to Priestley for aerated water, and to Goodyear – whose name is now on many tires.