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The Rubber Boom

The rubber boom is what first opened Amaz⌠nia to large-scale development. It brought in lots of money, which made the few people who controlled the market very rich. Unfortunately, the people who did most of the work were poorly-paid and ill-treated. The workers, mostly Indians, usually ended up owing money to their European bosses who paid very little, and then drastically overcharged for basic goods such as food and tools. For example, the bosses might sometimes charge their workers up to $50 for a single chicken. The Indian workers were poorly educated and were easily cheated. This system where the workers are always in debt is called debt-bondage, and forces people to work in the hope of clearing false "debts" which they will never be able to repay. People in line through the use of threats and violence. One company, The Peruvian Rubber Company, was ...

All the money accumulated by the bosses went into building fancy homes and other buildings (such as the Manaus Opera House), buying exotic ...

But how could such a simple substance as rubber create so much fuss???

The biggest development to affect Amaz⌠nia was the rubber boom of the 19th century and early 20th century. The Indians had been using rubber long before the arrival of the Europeans. Rubber was collected by cutting into trees which would bleed a milky white sap called latex. This could then be processed into rubber.

The Indians used rubber for repairing holes in canoes, coating drumsticks, and making rubber syringes to suck up and squirt fluids. They even made rubber balls for Indian children to play with. At first, the Europeans treated rubber as a curiosity – they knew that it had special properties, but weren't sure how to use it. But gradually, European inventors found out how to treat rubber so that it could be used to make waterproof raincoats and boots, inflatable rubber tyres for bicycles (and cars), and many other useful things.

Two factors that created the right conditions for a "boom":

Lots of people wanted rubber for making a wide variety of products, and;

Amaz⌠nia was the only place where rubber trees grew. Because there was no other place for anyone to get rubber, the rubber sellers charged very high prices and became extremely rich.

The rubber boom meant that lots of money was flowing into Amaz⌠nia. The rubber sellers (sometimes called rubber "barons") built huge houses for themselves rebuilt the cities of Manaus and BelΘm as replicas of the finest European cities. They had expensive restaurants, electric tramways, telephones, opera houses and theatres, and (eventually) motorcars and paved roads. The rubber boom meant significant changes for Amaz⌠nia. But, unfortunately, most people in Amaz⌠nia never made any money from the rubber boom because they were cheated and abused by the rubber barons who tried to keep all the profits for themselves.

The boom ended suddenly in 1912, when rubber plantations in Malaysia (planted from seedlings stolen from the Amazon over thirty years before) started to producing enough rubber to offer an alternative source.

Rubber was known to the Indians even before the Europeans arrived. They used it to fashion simple tools and syringes for water and other liquids. The Portuguese settlers used latex rubber to waterproof clothing and boots. The Portuguese nobility also used to send clothing and footwear away to Brazil to be waterproofed in this way.

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The Amazon Indians had been using rubber for centuries, using it to waterproof containers and to make simple tools. However it remained only a curiosity for most early Europeans because untreated rubber was difficult to work with – its texture changed with the weather (it was soft and sticky in hot weather, but hard and brittle in the cold). However, the first practical use for it was discovered in 1770 by the British chemist, Joseph Priestley, who discovered that it could be used for erasing pencil marks. An enterprising Scotsman called because it became sticky and smelly in hot weather, or hard and brittle in cold weather.

____ from Encarta ____

Some of the properties and uses of rubber were discovered by the Native South Americans long before the voyages of Columbus in 1492 made the knowledge available to Europe. For many years, the Spaniards tried to duplicate the water-resistant products (shoes, coats, and capes) of the Native South Americans, but they were unsuccessful. Rubber was merely a museum curiosity in Europe for the next two centuries.

In 1731 the French government sent the mathematical geographer Charles Marie de La Condamine to South America on a geographical expedition. In 1736 he sent back to France several rolls of crude rubber, together with a description of the products fabricated from it by the people of the Amazon Valley. General scientific interest in the substance and its properties was revived. In 1770 the British chemist Joseph Priestley discovered that rubber can be used to erase pencil marks by rubbing, the property from which the name of the substance is derived. In 1791 the first commercial application of rubber was initiated when an English manufacturer, Samuel Peal, patented a method of waterproofing cloth by treating it with a solution of rubber in turpentine. The British inventor and chemist Charles Macintosh, in 1823, established a plant in Glasgow for the manufacture of waterproof cloth and the rainproof garments that have since borne his name.

Rubber Plantations

The wild rubber trees of the South American jungles continued to be the main source of crude rubber for most of the 19th century. In 1876 the British explorer Sir Henry Wickham collected about 70,000 seeds of H. brasiliensis, and, despite a rigid embargo, smuggled them out of Brazil. The seeds were successfully germinated in the hothouses of the Royal Botanical Gardens in London, and were used to establish plantations first in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then in other tropical regions of the eastern hemisphere. Similar plantations have since been established, largely within a narrow belt extending about 1,100 km (about 700 mi) on both sides of the equator. About 99 per cent of plantation rubber comes from south-eastern Asia. Attempts to establish significant rubber plantations in the tropical zone of the western hemisphere have failed because of widespread tree loss as a result of a leaf blight.

Development of Production Processes

In the United States, rubberised goods had become popular by the 1830s, and rubber bottles and shoes made by the Native South Americans were imported in substantial quantities. Other rubber articles were imported from England, and in 1832, at Roxbury, Massachusetts, John Haskins and Edward Chaffee organised the first rubber-goods factory in the United States. However, the resulting products, like the imported articles, became brittle in cold weather, and tacky and malodorous in summer. In 1834 the German chemist Friedrich Ludersdorf and the American chemist Nathaniel Hayward discovered that the addition of sulphur to gum rubber lessened or eliminated the stickiness of finished rubber goods. In 1839 the American inventor Charles Goodyear, using the findings of the two chemists, discovered that cooking rubber with sulphur removed the gum's unfavourable properties, in a process called vulcanisation. Vulcanised rubber has increased strength and elasticity and greater resistance to changes in temperature than unvulcanised rubber; it is impermeable to gases, and resistant to abrasion, chemical action, heat, and electricity; vulcanised rubber also exhibits high frictional resistance on dry surfaces and low frictional resistance on water-wet surfaces.

Reclamation of Scrap

Shortly after the invention of the pneumatic tyre in 1877, the American manufacturer Chapman Mitchell founded a new branch of the industry by introducing the acid-reclamation process for scrap rubber, which recycled old rubber so it could be used in new products. This process used hot sulphuric acid to destroy fabric incorporated in the scrap and heat treatment to render the scrap rubber sufficiently plastic to incorporate in batches of crude rubber. About 1905 the alkaline-recovery process was invented by the American chemist Arthur H. Marks, who also established the first rubber-factory laboratory. His alkaline-recovery process permitted the use of large quantities of reclaimed rubber without seriously impairing the quality of the finished product. In the following year the American chemist George Oenslager, working in Marks's laboratory on the problem of using low-grade rubber in manufacturing processes, discovered organic accelerators of vulcanisation, such as phenylamine (aniline) and thiocarbanilide. These accelerators not only reduced the time of heating necessary for vulcanisation by 60 to 85 per cent, but also increased the quality of the product.

Prolonged Rubber Life

The next great advance in rubber technology came a decade later with the invention of the accelerated-ageing oven for measuring rubber deterioration. This oven duplicated, in a few days, the results of years of normal use. It enabled rubber technologists to measure rapidly the deterioration caused by various conditions, especially exposure to atmospheric oxygen. The use of these ovens led scientists to add chemical agents called antioxidants to the rubber; this prolonged the useful life of heavy rubber articles such as car tyres. Within a few years, new chemical compounds were created that markedly slowed the deterioration of soft rubber goods such as gloves, sheeting, and tubing.

Another development in rubber technology involved the use of uncoagulated latex. Methods were developed of extruding rubber in fine threads for use in the fabrication of textiles, such as those used in elastic undergarments, and also of electroplating rubber on metals and other materials.

_____ End Encarta ____

The Amazon's rubber boom occurred during the late 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. Numerous uses for rubber were being discovered, particularly with the advent of "vulcanisation" and the motor car.

This is a period of great wealth and prosperity for some – though not for the Indians, or seringueiros, who collected the rubber. The seringueiros usually lived alone in the forests, collecting rubber and curing it by rolling it on a stick over top of a fire. The balls of rubber would then be used as partial payment for western goods and canned foods from stores and warehouses owned by the rubber barons – though the prices at which the seringueiros purchased goods were hugely inflated, usually leaving them in debt to the rubber barons and dependent on producing even more rubber for market. For example, in Manaus at the time of the rubber boom, a chicken could cost as much as $50, and a bag of carrots about $20.

For the rubber barons this boom brought them huge wealth, and lead to Manaus developing into an extravagant European-style city located in the middle of a tropical jungle. It was during this period that the magnificent Manaus Opera House was built, with performances from the finest artists from around the world. Ocean liners with first-class accommodations would regular travel the Amazon, going between Manaus, New York, and the capitals of Europe laden with bankers, businessmen, and socialites.