In the Realm of Rubber - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 215

Bujaru—reached an astonishing 450,000 pairs by 1839, 54 when the US population was
only 12 million. In William Henry Edwards's volume that so influenced Henry Walter
Bates, 55 he described this industry in this way: “The man of the house returned from the
forest about noon, bringing nearly two gallons of milk that he had been collecting since
about daybreak. . . . In making the shoes, two girls were the artistes in the little thatched
hut. . . . the shoe last was dipped in rubber milk and immediately held over the smoke
. . . [where it] dried at once. It was then redipped and the process repeated until the shoe
was of sufficient thickness. . . . The shoe is now cut from the last and is ready for sale,
bringing in about 12 cents.” 56
These young “artistes” were probably working for T. C. Wales, the first major rubber
purveyor in the Unites States, who started his enterprise in Boston in 1823, when he
began a “putting out system,” sending shoe lasts to Brazil and buying the rubber shoes
made on them in return. Indeed, rubber footwear and waterproofing dominated the in-
dustry to the mid-1800s. 57 Charles Macintosh found that naphtha added to rubber could
make the substance more stable (it was brittle in cold and could get very gummy and
stinky when hot). By using rubber as a waterproof coating for cloth, Macintosh created
raincoats that took on the name of their inventor. 58 Charles Goodyear's (re)discovery of
vulcanization, theprocessthatstabilizedlatexsothatitremainedflexiblewhencoldand
didnotdegradewhenheated,vastlyincreasedtheindustrialpossibilitiesofthegum.The
firstpneumatictirewasmadein1845,thoughitsadoptionwaslimitedasthetechnology
itself needed more work. Still, Macintosh and Goodyear were eager participants in Lon-
don's Great Exhibit of “Works of Industry of all Nations,” displaying a kind of rubbery
“Cabinet of Wonders” with their coats, boots, curtains, flooring, and tires. In 1852 John
Dunlop developed a solid tire for carriage wheels, and by 1869, rubber tires were being
fitted onto bicycles. At the Wolverhampton British Bicycle Championships, J. Moore
wonvirtuallyalltheheats,“showinghisheels”asthesportinglingoputit,onlytofailin
the final as his back tire came off. These earlier rubber commodities focused mostly on
apparel and waterproofing, for which there was great demand. But the rubber industry
really took off as cities began to suburbanize, communication networks expanded, and
medical and domestic uses developed, creating a great demand for industrial machinery,
gaskets, electric and telecommunications cables, and tires for bicycles and cars.
In 1895 the first car tire was used in the Paris to Bordeaux car race with Michelin's
product, to very mixed reviews (more than twenty-two tires were used to cover a dis-
tance of 720 miles). The industrial demand for rubber for transport was not limited to
tires: by 1900 soft gum pads held in place by horses' metal shoes protected their feet
frombumpsandinjuriesoncobblestoneandrockstreets(atechnologystillinusetoday),
and there was talk of rubber street pavers. Rubber for belting, as insulation for electric
wires, in gaskets, and increasingly for medical and scientific applications grew dramat-