This timeline traces rubber back to its beginnings, follows the British experiments, the plantation startings, Goodyear’s perseverance and brings us out to the present with latex foam.

4th Century BC	Herodotus Zanzibar	Claimed to have seen natives playing with balls from Lydia which bounced high in the air. This seems to be the only reference to “rubber” in the old world.
6th Century	Aztecs & Mayas Mexico & Central America	Played with balls, dipped feet to make shoes, coated fabrics etc. Gulf of Mexico. (Pictures copied in National Museum, Mexico)
1493	Columbus Haiti	1st European recorded to have seen rubber balls but second hand observation – not recorded by Columbus himself.
1528	H Cortez Spain	Returned to Spain with two teams of ball players.
1536	D’Orviedo y Valdes Spain	Describes the N American Indian ball game (Batey). Some balls light in weight – perhaps they were of blown rubber.
1735 – 1745	Charles Marie de la Condamine Andes	Described how Indians “milked” trees for liquid to waterproof fabrics. The Indians called the tree “HEVA” and the gum from the liquid “CAHUTSCHU”. He used the word “latex” to describe the “milk” or sap from the tree.
1751	La Condamine France	Presented his and Fresneau’s work to Paris Academy of Science.
1755	Don José Portugal	The King of Portugal sent boots to Para (a region in French Guiana, South America) to be waterproofed.  The first sapling of the ‘hevea braziliensis’ had been discovered in French Guiana by Fresneau just years before, causing a bit of confusion between the different types of latex dripping trees.
1761	F Fresneau France	Discovered turpentine an ideal solvent for rubber. He told Minister Bertan who ‘leaked’ information to two professional Scientists, Herrisant and Macquer.
1770	E Nairne UK	Started to sell cubes of rubber from his artists’ shop as pencil erasers.
1770	Priestly (of oxygen fame) UK	Noted that Nairne sold a ½ inch cube of material for erasing pencil marks for 3 shillings. He called it “INDIA RUBBER” having found from whence it came.
1783	JAC Charles France	First hydrogen-filled balloon. The fabric was rubber-proofed oiled silk.
1803	France	Probably the first ‘Rubber Factory’ (to make elastic bands) built near Paris.
1813	J Clark UK	Patent for making inflatable articles from rubber interior-coated fabrics – beds, cushions etc.
1820	T Hancock UK	First patent for dry rubber; cut strips for elasticizing clothes, braces etc. Opened a factory in London which became ‘James Lyne Hancock”.
1823	C Macintosh UK	Realized that if fabric coated with rubber solution then had another layer of fabric applied to rubber, the three layer sandwich was waterproof and not sticky –“MACINTOSH”.
1827	UK	First recorded use of rubber hoses used against a fire (in London).
1828	EM Chaffee USA	Roxbury India Rubber Co. founded (1st US rubber Co.).
1832	A Barbier &  NE Daubrée France	Founded company named after themselves. Eventually became Michelin et Cie.
1834	T Hancock & C Macintosh UK	Hancock became director of Chas Macintosh and Co.
1834	C Goodyear USA	Became intrigued by rubber – some say obsessed after seeing rubber goods in New York store of the Roxbury India Rubber Co. And so begins the race between Goodyear and Hancock to improve on and experiment with rubber.
1837	C Dickens UK	Wrote that Mr. Pickwick’s frown vanished like the marks of a blacklead pencil beneath the influence of India rubber.
1839	C Goodyear USA	Left a mix of rubber, sulphur and white lead on a hot stove and he recognised that the resulting material was “CURED” of all its defects. It no longer softened on heating/hardened on cooling and it had lost its stickiness. Now rubber no longer melted in the summer and became as brittle as glass in the winter.
1842 / 1843	T Hancock UK	Identified sulphur in a piece of Goodyear’s cured rubber. Could not duplicate cure as did not know about white lead, but effected cure with rubber/molten sulphur. Nicknamed the process “vulcanization,” after the Roman god of fire, a term much easier to remember than Goodyear’s name for the finished product “rubber gum elastic.”
1842	UK	The UK began to import wild grown rubber from Singapore (from ficus elasticus and urceola elastica). The ‘hevea braziliensis’tree which we use today was still undeveloped. Most of the latex collected was from South America at this time.
1847	JG Ingram UK	Began manufacture of vulcanized rubber balloons.
1848	UK	Byrne India-Rubber Co. founded later sold to Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Co.
1853	Amazonia	3 tons of rubber exported.
1853	USA	Rubber sole with leather edging (to sew to uppers) appeared. The rubber sole of boots is called a commando, thus where the military squadron got its name.
1855	C Goodyear Junior USA	Patented use of ebonite for dental plates. Around the same time that Goodyear received his patent on vulcanizing (sadly 3 years after, anesthesia was patented by a fellow named Wells. Relatively speaking, Wells’s discovery made getting your teeth pulled a moderately painless experience, so teeth were being pulled left and right. This meant, of course, that the demand for false teeth was rising proportionately. Before vulcanization, denture bases had been made primarily of gold and were both costly and difficult to make. After vulcanization, denture bases could be made of vulcanized rubber set in plaster molds. This process did not demand a great deal of skill, and soon scores of dentists had small, round vulcanizers with which to ply their trade. These were called “dental pot” vulcanizers and would be used eventually to manufacture the first rubber stamps.
1859	UK	New Liverpool Rubber Co founded – later to become Dunlop Rubber Co.
1860	Brazil	Rubber prices at all time high – cost more than silver.
1862	J Leighton USA	Invented the ubiquitous rubber stamp. Metal printing-stamps, also called hand stamps or mechanical hand stamps, preceded rubber ones by six to eight years.  The union financed the war by issuing revenue stamps which were required on virtually all business papers of any kind — notes, drafts, bills, checks, etc.
1868	USA	A shoe was produced with a vulcanized rubber sole fused to a canvas upper. Reputedly known as the ‘felonies’ and also ‘brothel creepers’ they must have been very quiet! In the UK they were eventually called Plimsols by Philip Lace (1876).
1875	G Bouchardet France	Suggested that isoprene was the primary unit of rubber and obtained a ‘rubber’ by heating it with fuming hydrochloric acid. The first synthetic rubber?
1876	H Wickham Brazil	Three years after his commissioning for this project, he dispatched about 70,000 hevea seeds to the Botanical gardens in Kew, England. 2397 germinated.
1876	Singapore	50 seedlings arrived from Kew. Died due to neglect. After several false starts, including one by a planter in northern Borneo who felled his plantation after finding no rubber balls hanging from the branches, the prospects were grim.
1877	UK	In all, by the end of 1877, Kew had distributed over 3000 seedlings; vastly more than their primary stock, so there must have been considerable propagation from cuttings. Sri Lanka then forwarded 22 seedlings from that delivery of 100 to Singapore. All of these survived and Henry Ridley, Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, was later to remark that it was from these 22 seedlings in the Gardens that more than 75% of the cultivated plants in Malaysia were derived.
1884	G Daimler Germany	Produced a light-weight four stroke petrol engine which would fit in a ‘horseless carriage’
1884	C Macintosh UK	Invented a ‘cushion tyre’ for bicycles.
1885	Belgium Congo	Exported first African wild rubber. King Leopold of Belgium had spent the last 20 years manipulating European countries and banks to set up his kingdom in the Congo.  While ivory was his first expectation of profits, rubber soon took over.  The slavery and gruesome tales of this period of history are captured in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
1888	JB Dunlop UK	“Reinvented” the pneumatic tyre, now bicycles and vehicles were available to use it. Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Co. Ltd was formed to accommodate this great demand.
1890	JW Williams Belgium Congo	In an open letter to President Harrison he coined the phrase ‘A crime against humanity’ in describing what was happening in the Congo.
late 1800’s to 1920	JG Araujo, JC Arana & The Suarez brothers Amazonia	The three great overlords, all 3 specializing in torture, maiming and murder to amass their millions (JGA in the ‘Manaos’ region) (Suarez, 16,000,000 acres in Bolivia centred at Cachuela Esperanza). (JCA 14,000,000 acres in Colombia and Peru). Arana is the most documented because of the ‘Putumayo atrocities’
1895	H Ridley Singapore	The head of Singapore’s botanical garden, persuaded two coffee growers to plant two acres (.8 ha) of Hevea trees. Twelve years later more than 300,000 ha of rubber grew in plantations in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) and Malaya. Because of his very fervent promotion of this crop, he is popularly remembered by the nickname “Mad Ridley”.
1892	W Tilden UK	Synthesised ‘rubber’ from synthetic isoprene.
1898	F Seiberling &   C Sieberling USA	Goodyear Tyre and Rubber Co. formed.
1898	Michelin France	The “Michelin man” appeared for the first time.
1899	Sri Lanka	1st Plantation rubber shipped from Sri Lanka.
1900	Firestone USA	Firestone Tyre and Rubber Co formed.
1900	Michelin France	Michelin introduced grooved tire treads.
1901	Goodyear & Ford USA	Goodyear enters motor racing with Henry Ford.
1906	TW Miller USA	Patented the molded rubber hot water bottle.
1910	World	Wild rubber production around 85,000 tons (50% Amazonian, 25% African, much of the rest from Mexico) and 11,000 tons of plantation rubber.
1913 / 1914	World	Cross over point! Plantation output of NR exceeds that of wild (ca. 55/75,000 tons plantation to 66/49,000 tons of wild).
1914	WL Utermark UK	Patented latex concentration by centrifugation.
1914	P Schidrowitz & HA Goldsborough UK	Patented manufacture of foams from latex as opposed to dry rubber.
1915	SJ Peachy UK	The first practical patent for chlorinated rubber. Solutions as varnishes and corrosion- resistant paint.
1920	P Schidrowitz UK	Prevulcanization of latex and its use to manufacture dipped goods. This prevulcanization process let workers do away with the chemical sulphur chloride; instead they added polysulphides to the latex followed by controlled heating for a prolonged period of time. The end product gave a latex which was visually unchanged from the starting material but, when it was dried and gently heated, it had the properties of a normally vulcanized piece of dry rubber. The process was known as the Vultex process.
1924	Germany	Fossilized rubber 60,000,000 years old found in lignite deposits.
1920	World	Natural rubber production (on the plantations) 350,000 tons, only 37,000 tons wild.
1925	Germany	Serious work began on the synthesis of Synthetic polybutadiene (Buna).
1926	Rosenbaum UK	Quote: “Synthetic rubber is dead”.
1927	Henry Ford Brazil	Began to build ‘Fordlandia’ – a complete town in the jungle with (eventually) a plantation of over a million rubber trees.  However, due to leaf blight, his plantation was wiped out twice and then abandoned within 7 years.
1929	E.A. Murphy UK	A research scientist at Dunlop Tyre and Rubber Company accidentally discovered that mixing together and heating soap, liquid latex, and gelling agents would create latex foam.  His wife suggested using a cake mixer to create the airy product.  It worked. The latex foam branded Dunlopillo® was soon used for theater seating, cushions for cars and airplanes.
1931	S Ishibashi Japan	Forms Bridgestone Co Ltd.
1931	Dunlop	The first latex mattress sold using the Sodium Silicoflouride process (known as the Dunlop® process).
1933	N Christensen USA	Invented the ‘simple’ ‘O’ ring seal.
1935	Russia	Leon, Joseph and Ansil Talalay reinvented latex-foam rubber products. They manufactured and sold latex mattresses to Sears, Roebuck & Company in American department stores.
1940’s	USA	With Japan occupying prime rubber-producing areas in Southeast Asia, the U.S. feared it would run out of the vital material. Every tire, hose, seal, valve, and inch of wiring required rubber. They created a program to come up with some novel plans to produce rubber, including planting dandelions—their milky sap a small, but useful source of rubber—in 41 states. Extensive work on synthetic rubber yielded a product that, in time, economists predicted, would replace natural rubber.
1943	USA	GR-S production started (now known as SBR). Government rubber-styrene -> styrene butadiene rubber (c.f. Buna S).
1945	Dow Corning & General Elec. USA	Silicone rubber. Not a sulphur cure, peroxides used.
Late 1940’s	B.F. Goodrich, Dunlopillo, and Radium LLC USA & UK	Made Talalay process latex foam commercially practical.
1950’s	Brazil	Last wild rubber exported.
1960	World	NR production 2,000,000 tons, Synthetics 2,500,000 tons.
1970	World	NR production 3,000,000 tons, Synthetics 5,750,000 tons.
1972	Dunlop UK	Dunlop introduced the ‘tubeless’ tyre.
1973	OPEC Arabia	The oil embargo of 1973 doubled the price of synthetic rubber and made oil consumers more conscious of their gas mileage. The concern over gas mileage brought an unexpected threat to the synthetic rubber market: the widespread adoption of the radial tire, which Michelin had imported to the US in 56. The radial tire replaced the simple bias tires (which had made up 90 percent of the market only five years earlier) and within a few years virtually all cars were rolling on radials. Synthetic rubber did not have the strength for radials; only natural rubber could provide the required sturdiness.
1990	World	Perhaps 5 billion plantation “hevea braziliensis” trees producing rubber worldwide.
1997	World	NR production 6,500,000 tons, Synthetics 8,700,000 tons.
1990	Arpico Sri Lanka	Starts massive US campaign to revive the latex mattress industry.

For more information on historical perspective, famous people involved with its processing and natural latex’s chemistry, technology and conservation, visit BouncyBalls.com