Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber--A Modern Marvel

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Tears of the Tree

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Tears of the Tree THE STORY OF RUBBER — A MODERN MARVEL

JOHN LOADMAN

AC

AC

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # J. Loadman 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn ISBN 0–19–856840–1 (Hbk.)

978–0–19–856840–7

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Lina Marriage for over thirty-five years to someone with a passion for rubber must often have been difficult!


Acknowledgements The basic framework of this book grew out of over thirty years of reading and collecting snippets from colleagues at the Tun Abdul Razak Research Centre (TARRC). The library there offered a range of early twentieth century books on rubber technology which were an invaluable source of primary data. Second-hand bookshops and internet searches for referenced books slowly filled in the gaps, as did the disposal of books and journals such as the India Rubber Journal and India Rubber World to the Plastics Historical Society (PHS) by universities which had no space in their libraries (or syllabuses) for old science books. More recently, information and illustrations have come to me from a wide range of sources. Many of the illustrations come from two locations, the photo-archives of the TARRC and the PHS. The latter set of some 700 glass lantern slides has an interesting history in that it was accumulated and catalogued in the 1920s by the Research Association of British Rubber Manufacturers, where it remained, virtually unknown and forgotten, until it was about to be thrown away in the 1990s. Luckily, the archivist of the PHS, Colin Williamson, saved them and they were donated to the PHS. Acknowledgement is given to both of these sources for the use of their collections and to Colin for scanning many of the slides onto a compact disk for me. Other illustrations have a range of histories. Those of the ball courts were supplied by my niece, Nesta Waters, whilst Ridley’s letter to Turrill, dated 8 July 1950, was initially located in the ‘Miscellaneous Correspondence Collection’ of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew by Hew Prendergast, and was supplied to me by Michele Losse and

Acknowledgements viii Julia Steele. The final paragraph is published with the permission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanical Gardens. The photograph of H. M. Stanley was unaccountably missing from the two large collections mentioned above and was supplied by the Royal Geographical Society, whilst the illustration of the principles of injection moulding was supplied by REP UK. Permission to reproduce them is acknowledged. Wong Fot Jaw kindly e-mailed me the photograph of the 1877 Hevea tree in Kuala Kangsar. The cartoon showing ‘imps’ attacking a piece of rubber in Fig. 13.4 was drawn by my old TARRC colleague, Peter Lewis, and is used with his permission. This truly is a case of one picture being better than one thousand words. The early history of the steamship Amazonas was found in the Maritime Navy List Maritime Directory by Bryan Smalley, who gave me its identification number—70893—from which later records could be traced. Details of the voyage to and from South America in the summer of 1876 including the crew agreement, records, and release documents were located at the Maritime History Archive of the Memorial University of Newfoundland by Paula Marshall, whilst the Amazonas’ ‘bill of entry’ was found in the Liverpool Records Office by another retired colleague and friend, Dr Arthur Edwards. Particular thanks are due to Frank James, a descendant of Thomas Hancock’s brother, John, and the family archivist who provided me with much biographical detail of the Hancock family. It was he who set me on the trail of the more than 700 lantern slides mentioned above. It was during this search that I contacted Jackie McCarthy at the Rubber and Plastics Research Association (Rapra) who, whilst searching unsuccessfully for the slides with Sheila Cheese, came across a dust-covered box containing numerous documents and correspondence relating to, or written by, Thomas Hancock which had been ‘loaned’ to the forerunner

Acknowledgements

ix of Rapra in the early years of the twentieth century and had lain ‘lost’ ever since. My thanks are extended to Carole Lee at Rapra for giving the documents to me to be returned to Frank James. My thanks are also due to Ted Rogers of the Hackney Borough Archives who was able to trace the location of Hancock’s home, Marlborough Cottage, from census and land registry records, although its well-established name was not found in any of the documentation. This enabled the PHS to place a plaque on a site of great significance to the whole of the industrialised world. I would also like to thank Ovidio Lagos, who is currently writing a biography of J. C. Arana, for supplying me with a portrait of the man himself. Finally, my thanks go to my friends at the TARRC, particularly Gail Reader for her help in many ways and David Cawthra for supplying me with the cover photograph of the Hevea tree being tapped. If any illustrations have ‘sneaked through’ without being accredited, I hope I will be forgiven and the original owner will be content to see his or her work published here.


Contents List of Illustrations Outline Introduction

xii xvii xxv

1. The Mesoamericans and the ‘all-American ball game’ 2. Europe goes west 3. What’s in a name? 4. The battles of the giants—Charles Goodyear 5. The battles of the giants—Thomas Hancock 6. Rubber goes east 7. The King and the Congo 8. Slaves to rubber 9. Competition! 10. The heavy mob 11. Chemicals and curatives 12. Padding or performance enhancer? 13. The rot sets in 14. Death and destruction 15. Timeline

1 12 22 29 45 81 108 143 164 188 207 220 239 258 277

Bibliography Index

315 319

List of Illustrations 0.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 3.1a 3.1b 3.1c 3.1d 4.1a 4.1b 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11

Mayan doll made from fabric and rubber. Classical design of a ball court at Yagul. Mayan ball players. Ball court at Uxmal. Close-up of the ring. Severed head inside a Mayan ball. Charles Marie de la Condamine. La Gataudie`re. Hevea braziliensis Castilloa elastica Ficus elastica Landolphia owariensis Nathaniel Hayward His concrete ‘rubber tree’ memorial. Charles Goodyear. Charles Goodyear’s tombstone. Marlborough Cottage. Hancock’s pickle. Hancock’s first metal pickle. Charles Macintosh. The Hancock factory, Goswell Road, 1850. The ‘Grasshopper’, built by Easton & Amos, 1822. The Chas. Macintosh & Co. shop in Charing Cross, 1840. William Brockedon. The Chas. Macintosh & Co. trademark—HAN (d) COCK. Stephen Moulton. Rubber moulding of a pastoral scene which may have been shown on the Hancock stand at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

xxvi 3 4 5 7 14 20 27 27 27 27 39 39 42 44 47 51 52 54 55 57 61 63 67 68 71

5.12 5.13 5.14a 5.14b 5.15 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5a 6.5b 6.6a 6.6b

6.7 6.8 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

List of Illustrations The Chas. Macintosh and Co. factory in Manchester as it was in 1857. Thomas Hancock: (a) an ebonite medallion, and (b) a portrait. Hancock’s memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery The inscription on Hancock’s memorial. Plaque erected on the site of Marlborough Cottage, 2003. A smoked ball of rubber (pelle) being cut in half in Para´ to check quality. Bill of Entry for the SS Amazonas, Liverpool, 12 June 1876: (a) heading, and (b) details. The last paragraph of Ridley’s letter of 1950. Henry Wickham with one of the original Heveas at Heneratgoda in 1911. One of the original Heveas planted at Kuala Kangsar in 1877 Its associated plaque. H. N. Ridley with a Hevea tree showing herringbone tapping. A modern tapping panel. Thin slivers are removed each time the tree is tapped. By tapping progressively the trunk can regenerate and the process can continue. Sir Henry Wickham, 12 october 1926. Tapping Hevea trees on a modern Malaysian plantation. How to get rich in the Congo. ‘Henry Morton Stanley’. Graph of rubber exports from Para´, 1836–1872. Sketch map of Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador showing the rubber rivers and towns. Rubber dealing in Manaus in the early twentieth century. The public face of rubber tapping: (a) Amazonian Seringueiros, and (b) tappers smoking rubber pelles.

xiii 75 78 79 80 82 91 94 98 100 100 102

102 105 106 109 115 144 146 147 152

xiv 8.5 8.6 9.1

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7a 10.7b 10.8a 10.8b 10.9 10.10 10.11a 10.11b 10.12 10.13 10.14 11.1 11.2 11.3

List of Illustrations The not-so-public face of the rubber industry: an Indian woman condemned to death by starvation on the upper Putumayo. J. C. Arana in 1925 as senator from Loreto. Graph of natural and synthetic rubber production 1900–1997, and natural rubber production as a percentage of the total elastomers produced worldwide. A simple spreading table. Hancock’s 1840 masticator. Single-roller masticators manufactured by (a) Francis Shaw, and (b) David Bridge. A three-roll calender. Moulton’s three-roll calender—the Iron Duke. Diagram of mastication and the addition of additives. An early electric two-roll mill A modern sixty-inch two-roll mill. A diagram of a Bridge–Banbury A Banbury internal mixer. Three-mould hydraulic press. Milling and extruding. A schematic illustration of injection moulding, supplied by REP UK A bathing cap being injection moulded. Batch dipping of (a) bathing caps, (b) catheters, and (c) balls and bladders. Modern continuous production of dipped medical gloves. Various toys made from latex. A rheometer printout for the vulcanisation of a ‘conventional’ mix. Sheets of natural rubber after smoking in a smokehouse. A vulcanised blend of natural rubber and nitrile rubber.

159 163

167 189 191 191 193 194 195 196 196 198 198 200 202 203 203 205 205 206 212 215 217

11.4a 11.4b

12.1 12.2 12.3

12.4

13.1 13.2 13.3a

13.3b

13.4 13.5

List of Illustrations xv A two-phase polymer system with weak bonding (white areas) between the phases 218 A three-phase polymer system where the third polymer (thin black line around the white areas) acts as a ‘compatibiliser’ between the other two phases. 218 An advertisement for rubber fillers which appeared in the early twentieth century. 221 A representative virgin carbon black as seen using a transmission electron microscope. 227 A micrograph of (a) a two-elastomer co-continuous blend, and (b) a two-elastomer blend showing one discrete (dark) phase and one continuous (light) phase. 230 Ebonite articles: (a) a jumble of necklace chains, (b) pendants, (c) buttons and brooches, (d) detail of one brooch (top right in (c)), (e) fountain pens, (f ) flute, (g) pipe bowl, (h) revolver hand grips, (i) brooch, ( j) Queen Victoria Jubilee medal, (k) ornamental comb, (l) combs, (m) medicine holders, and (n) cigarette lighter. 236–237 Examples of degraded rubber fabric. 240 ‘The Proofer’s Song’. 241 Substitution positions on a phenolic ring. This is the basic phenolic group. At each point (2–6) there is a C–H group and the substitution positions are named. 245 Possible atmospheric degradation routes illustrated by formulae. A commercial phenolic antioxidant (top) has alkyl groups at the ortho- positions which ‘block’ it from further attack. The left-hand product shows two molecules oxidised and joined together to give a quinone. The right-hand product has been nitrated in the para- position. 245 Pictorial illustration of possible routes to rubber degradation—the ‘imps’. 246 Sulphur bloom seen under a microscope. 252

List of Illustrations xvi 13.6 Stress-induced surface oxidation showing loss of the smooth surface. 14.1 ‘The Rubber Doll, A Christmas Story in Verse’. 14.2 Old tyres used as (a) boat fenders in Crete, and (b) planters in Malaysia. 14.3 A Mexican house using old tyres filled with soil to create a level stable (?) foundation. 14.4 ‘Tyred’ furniture. 14.5 A Malaysian rubber plantation (or factory?) in 1996.

255 259 267 268 269 275

Outline Introduction What is it all about? Can a natural product which has been in use for over three and a half thousand years still be relevant in today’s age of synthetics? This book sets out to look at the history of rubber, a unique material without which the modern world could not exist, and poses the question ‘If it was not there would we have invented it?’

1. The Mesoamericans and the ‘All-American Ball Game’ Although the story of rubber begins between thirty and sixty million years ago, genuine records of its use began with the earliest settlements in Mesoamerica. This chapter tells of the history of the ‘ball game’ from its earliest beginnings with the Olmecs around 1600 bc through to Cortez in the sixteenth century ad. It discusses the cultural significance of the game and its religious significance as set out in the Mayan ‘Council Book’, the Popol Vuh. This was the start of a long story of blood, sacrifice, and murder which was to last into the twentieth century!

2. Europe goes West This chapter covers the period from the early sixteenth century through to the development of Western interest in the material due to the exploration of Amazonia by Charles Marie de la Condamine and his relationship with the ‘Father of rubber’,

Outline xviii François Fresneau, towards the end of the eighteenth century. La Condamine used many words relating to rubber for the first time, including caoutchouc, generally translated as ‘the weeping tree’, but it is suggested that its origins could be from ‘caa ochu’—an ancient Inca word relating to mysticism and witchcraft—a connection quite possible in view of the horrors of the Popol Vuh. The chapter includes biographies of both men and describes their cooperative work, including the presentation of the first scientific paper on rubber, presented to the French Academy of Science in 1751.

3. What’s in a Name? Many plants produce latex and several plants of possible early significance are described here. There was much confusion over who was talking about what due to the range of botanical names given to many of these plants, and it took a sudden flash of realisation by a young student that different people were talking about different trees to make sense of the literature. The chapter also looks at the history of rubber-related names (including ‘rubber’ itself ) which are common today and discusses their origins.

4. The Battles of the Giants—Charles Goodyear Goodyear is well known as ‘the inventor of vulcanisation’ and this chapter, basically a biography of this perpetually ill man who sacrificed himself and his family in an attempt to cure rubber of its propensity to turn sticky when hot and brittle when cold, attempts to put some balance back into US presentations of the man as a genius and to look at what he was really like—his life of failures except for one fluke! It also contains a quote in full from a letter printed in a magazine in the mid-1860s which suggests that

Outline

xix it was a friend of Goodyear—a Mr Eli—who actually made the discovery (a letter believed to have been referenced nowhere before). Goodyear’s own description of his actual moment of discovery is so vague as to be historically useless and many different versions have been published since his original one. These are discussed.

5. The Battles of the Giants—Thomas Hancock Hancock was the founder of the UK rubber industry and this is his biography. It draws on family archives and many documents recently unearthed by the author ‘in a dusty box in a dusty cupboard under some dusty stairs’ which had been ‘lost’ since the early part of the nineteenth century. It looks at his siblings and their contribution to the world of rubber, as well as his complicated business relationship with Charles Macintosh. It describes the machinery he invented to process rubber and how this ran hand in hand with the industrial revolution—often at the ‘cutting edge’ of what could be made. Hancock’s independent discovery of vulcanisation, having seen from a sample of Goodyear’s material that it could actually be done, is described in some detail and should be recognised as possibly one of the first ‘design experiments’ in chemistry. For many years from 1836 onwards he was involved in numerous legal battles and these are detailed. The interesting fate of his home in Stoke Newington (which the author identified and documented for the first time) from his death until 1941 is briefly summarised. Many of the illustrations used in this and other chapters were discovered in a unique collection of lantern slides prepared in the early 1920s. The author discovered these slides in the archives of the Plastics Historical Society where they had been ‘forgotten’ after having being discarded by the company which had them ‘taking up space’.

xx

Outline

6. Rubber goes East The first part of this chapter describes the work of Clements Markham in organising the shipment of rubber seeds from Amazonia to the UK and their propagation at Kew. This includes Henry Wickham’s biography and the famous story of his ‘seed theft’, as it became known after he told the story, initially in 1908. Investigations by the author discovered new documentation on the ship which brought the seeds from Amazonia, including detailed crew records and the bill of entry of the cargo into the UK which indicated that much of Wickham’s story was untrue. The question of how much was true is discussed. The irony of the Brazilian Government in labelling Wickham as a thief when the original idea of plantation rubber came from a Brazilian (at that time there was no restriction on the export of the seeds), and another Brazilian had stolen coffee seeds from Cayenne to begin the Brazilian coffee industry, is mentioned. The second part of the chapter is concerned with the shipment of rubber seedlings to the Far East and the establishment of plantations in Malaysia. It was a time of chaos and confusion, and to this day some confusion exists as to whether the seedlings which formed the basis of the plantation industry were those brought to the UK by Wickham or by the plantsman, Robert Cross. Although many authorities have firm ideas on this, mostly favouring Wickham, the evidence is listed which shows that many quoted references are selective and there must remain some doubt. A paragraph of a letter written by Henry Ridley (the founder of the plantation industry in Malaysia) which claims that the seedlings were from ‘Cross’ plants and not from Wickham is illustrated. Wickham’s life after delivering the seeds to Kew is documented. As with Goodyear, he seemed to be beset by failure and the chapter ends with an assessment of his flawed character.

Outline

xxi

7. The King and the Congo This is the story of King Leopold II and his ‘rape’ of the Congo. It tells of his early days and his desire to have an empire (and money) for the new country of Belgium, and how he manipulated public opinion into allowing him to take over a country larger than Europe and to strip it of anything of value. He was not aware that rubber could be a significant crop until demand rocketed and it was found to be collectable from a vine growing throughout the country. He enlisted the aid of H. M. Stanley and his biography is contained in the chapter. Some details are given of the procedures Leopold and his agents used to obtain the rubber. However, nemesis was on the way in the name of Edmund Morel, a young clerk in the office of a shipping company used by Leopold. The chapter continues by describing his (initially) one-man attempts to expose Leopold and shows how he got support from Roger Casement and missionaries in the region to eventually persuade the British Parliament to take action to publicise the truth and force Leopold out of power. They never succeeded as he died fighting a series of rearguard battles and it took the Belgian Government a long time, even after Leopold’s death, to act. The chapter ends with some statistics on the weight of rubber obtained from the Congo, its value and its cost in lives—one native for every 10 kg of rubber!

8. Slaves to Rubber What happened in the Congo was also ongoing in Amazonia as various ‘rubber barons’ carved up the river valleys and worked them to death—along with the indigenous natives and those bought in to labour with them. This chapter tells of these barons and uses one particular expose´ by a young American engineer,

Outline xxii Walter Hardenburg, of Julio Arana to illustrate the cruelty in this region. The story is of particular significance in the UK as Arana established his company here to raise money and have ‘protection’ from the British establishment. It details Hardenburg’s adventures on the Amazon and the court case in Britain in which Arana and the British end of the company were brought to book. The ratio of rubber to native was rather more cost effective than in the Congo, with an estimated 150 kg rubber for every native life.

9. Competition! Inevitably, the Victorian scientists believed that they could do better than God (nature), so they set out to discover what rubber actually was and then to synthesise a synthetic material which would do the job just as well. Here we look at their attempts to understand the structure of natural rubber and then the development of the synthetic rubber industry. Particular reference is made to the lives of Waldo Semon and Wallace Carothers who, in the first half of the twentieth century, developed synthetic rubbers (and plastics) which are still elastomers of choice in many applications today and which set the basis of the synthetic rubber industry. The chapter concludes with a list of the majority of synthetic rubbers available today, in many cases what they are used for, and how they are designated.

10. The Heavy Mob This, and the following chapters, although ‘scientific’ and ‘chemical’, are written to be understood by non-technical or non-expert readers. The growth of the rubber industry through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would not have been possible without the

Outline

xxiii development of machinery to mix rubber chemicals, mould the mixture, and vulcanise (cure) it to produce rubber products. This chapter describes this development from Hancock’s ‘pickle’ in 1819 to the modern equipment of today.

11. Chemicals and Curatives A vulcanised rubber product of today contains many ingredients, often a dozen or more, and a number of these are associated with the vulcanisation process. This chapter shows how a realisation that much more than just sulphur and rubber were involved in the process developed, and how different collections of chemicals (cure systems) were developed to give final products with optimised properties for their particular applications.

12. Padding or Performance Enhancer? Given the ever-increasing demand for rubber products through the second half of the nineteenth century, a demand which is still increasing today, and the shortage and expense of natural rubber, it was not surprising that it was soon found possible to add a whole raft of inorganic powders and still retain sufficient of the rubbery properties to make a commercially viable end product. This chapter investigates the history of the powders (fillers) used, the peculiar effects produced by some, and a realisation that some of them had much more to offer than just a ‘bulking-out’ effect.

13. The Rot Sets in Although Hancock claimed that the advent of vulcanisation had solved all the problems associated with rubber, he and many others soon found that the anticipated working life of many goods

Outline xxiv was cut short by degradation of the rubber so that, in the worst cases, they just fell apart. Here we consider the reasons for those problems and the development of chemicals which were able to slow down, but never halt, the inevitable deterioration. Some of these chemicals caused problems of their own and the reason for one—the bright yellow colouration of fabric in contact with rubber containing one type of chemical—shows that this is an ongoing area of research.

14. Death and Destruction As is implied in the previous chapter, all rubber goods have a finite life and the user or the producer is left with the problem of waste disposal. Recycling is the ‘buzz word’ of today and this final chapter discusses what ‘recycling’ options are available to a material which has been modified by vulcanisation so that, unlike glass or paper, the original rubber cannot be reclaimed. It has already been said that a rubber vulcanisate performs as it does because of its numerous additives, so we discuss what problems these might cause during any recycling process. Perhaps the final paragraph provides a new light with which to look at the argument between natural and synthetic elastomers.

15. Timeline A chronological listing of some 600 events in the history of rubber from the earliest days to 2000 ad.

Introduction There can be no one living today who is not familiar with rubber and its properties, but perhaps it is that very familiarity which has bred, if not contempt, at least an unthinking acceptance of the material and its position in society. This natural material has been used for almost four thousand years that we know of. It may, even today, be used ‘raw’ for creˆpe soles of high-quality shoes, or mixed with chemicals in the latex state, prior to having formers dipped into it, to produce such articles as baby bottle teats, condoms, or surgeons’ gloves. The mixed (or compounded) latex may also be treated to produce latex thread suitable for the finest underwear whilst, at the other extreme, dried rubber can be mixed with more chemicals, often including carbon black, to manufacture the strongest of engineering products, such as base isolation units for buildings in earthquake zones, conveyer belts, and, accounting for by far the greatest area of usage of elastomers, aircraft, off-road vehicle, and car tyres. If you doubt the remarkable properties of this material, then remember the faith a motorist puts in those few square inches of tyre which are all that hold a car (as well as its driver) on the wet tarmac as it powers down a precipitous mountain road. The history of the evolution of natural rubber, or NR as it is usually known, is a fascinating story. It is also a story confused in some important details, complex, and containing elements of greed and mayhem where, even today, the truth is sometimes obscure. For at least three thousand years before the first Europeans saw natural rubber, the Mesoamerican communities had developed

xxvi

Introduction

Fig. 0.1 Mayan doll made from fabric and rubber.

ways of collecting it and forming it into a wide variety of objects ranging from toys (see Fig. 0.1) and domestic products through medicinal devices and items relating to ritual sacrifice to tribute payments. They had also discovered ways of treating many of the objects to minimise their subsequent degradation during service. For some two hundred and fifty years following early European reports concerning this remarkable material, the ‘developed world’ was remarkably disinterested in its properties, and it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that the work of two Frenchmen, Charles Marie de la Condamine and François Fresneau, inspired the earliest stirrings of today’s rubber industry. Their reward was to be treated badly by history. La Condamine (1701– 1794) has several biographies on the Internet but only one, the

Introduction

xxvii ‘Catholic Encyclopedia’ (sic), notes ‘It is claimed that he introduced caoutchouc (natural rubber) into Europe.’ Of Fresneau (1703–1770), who has the strongest claim of all to be called ‘the father of the rubber industry’, even less is available unless one knows that his descendants are the Chasseloup-Laubat family and the family home is the Chateau de la Gataudie`re at Marennes. Two or three lines on that website provide his epitaph. There is also a picture on the site, but this contradicts the observation of his biographer (as we shall see in Chapter 2) that none exists. The embryonic industry grew slowly. It had a long history of failed applications, virtually all due to the different climatic conditions in Europe compared with those of Mesoamerica. Nevertheless, it was kept alive by a small number of dedicated scientists and entrepreneurs who believed that somehow rubber could be cured of its problems, which were mainly its tendency to become sticky when warm and brittle when cold. The door to solving this problem was opened in 1839 by the American Charles Goodyear, but he failed to patent his process until 1844. By this time the first patent for a similar process, based on the action between sulphur and rubber, had been granted to Thomas Hancock in the UK (BP9952/1843). This caused considerable resentment in the US, where it was claimed, an irrelevant point never denied by Hancock, that he only developed his procedure after examining a piece of Goodyear’s ‘cured’, or ‘vulcanised’, rubber. The embryonic industry passed rapidly to maturity without the usual childlike and teenage tantrums and, by 1868, the Frenchman, Turgan, was able to write: Rubber has, at the present day, become not only an essential factor of industry but also, and to an equal extent, of everyday life . . . it enters, under every size and shape, into the equipment of civilization.

Introduction xxviii It is perhaps ironic that these words were written some ten years before the invention of the internal combustion engine, twenty years before the pneumatic tyre, and thirty years before natural rubber latex medical gloves and condoms came into use. World commercial production figures for natural rubber in those early days vary from source to source, but during the 1850s it was probably no more than one to two thousand tons per annum. By 1875 it was close to 10 000 and at the turn of the century it passed 50 000, reaching 100 000 tons just before the Great War of 1914–1918. Today the world’s total production of rubber is about 15 000 000 tons, 6 000 000 tons of which is natural whilst 9 000 000 tons is synthetic. Obviously, the growth in demand for natural rubber closely paralleled the development of the motor car in the early years of the twentieth century (the reasons for the development of the synthetic rubber industry will be considered later), so the question is, where did all this rubber originate? The answer lies initially in the rubber-producing plants of the basins of the two great tropical rivers, the Amazon and the Congo, with lesser contributions from many other parts of the world. Later expansion was fuelled from plantations established in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and The Federated States of Malaya (Malaysia), followed by India, Indonesia, and Thailand. The purpose of this book is to draw all these threads together and to examine the story of natural rubber in its social context. We shall begin by examining the ways in which it affected the lives of the Mesoamerican Indians, consider how tales of its uses and the material itself were brought to Europe, and then address the periods of native African and South American exploitation prior to the start of the Great War (1914–1918) which resulted in a native death toll considerably greater than that of the war itself.

Introduction

xxix We will look at the famous characters of the last 500 years who featured in the story, as well as the development of the rubber industry through the nineteenth century. This will include a chapter devoted to the way in which the seeds for the plantation industry (literally) were planted. We shall address the synthetic rubber industry, its genesis and development through the first half of the twentieth century, and the direction in which the whole rubber industry might be moving in the twenty-first century. In the last four chapters we shall consider the use of fillers to extend the bulk and improve the properties of vulcanisates, and take a brief look at our current understanding of the vulcanisation process—a process which was hardly comprehended, although used empirically, until the latter half of the twentieth century. We shall review the problems that arise during the life cycle of rubber articles and how chemicals to prevent their degradation were developed. Finally, we shall look past old age to the death of the product and how that great ‘buzz word’, recycling, could apply to rubber vulcanisates. The question is often raised, ‘If rubber had not existed would man have invented it?’ This raises another interesting question. If we had no concept of an elastic material would we think of trying to create one and, if so, when? The whole synthetic rubber industry developed from research in the late nineteenth century when chemists ‘broke down’ natural rubber, recombined it to an elastic material, and discovered polymerisation. It is also true that many of the important plastics of today were discovered by accident as chemists attempted to make rubbers. Even then, it took the demands of the Second World War and blank cheques from the US Government to produce viable substitutes for the natural material. One could reasonably argue that, even if a

Introduction xxx passionate desire had existed to invent a ‘bouncy’ or ‘stretchy’ substance, with no natural material to provide a starting-point it would have been unlikely to have been discovered before well into the second half of the twentieth century. That really would have changed the world!

1 The Mesoamericans and the ‘All-American Ball Game’ The oldest known sample of rubber was reputed to have been found in 1924, in Germany, fossilised in lignite deposits, and some sixty million years old. It is described by Schidrowitz and Dawson in History of the rubber industry (1952). This could be the same material described by Auleytner in 1953, which was again found in Germany and dated to the Eocene period, some thirty million years ago. The last-known location of this was the Jagiellonian University, Cracow in 1994, from whence it appears to have vanished. Apart from this, and one reference to very bouncy balls by Herodotus, who attributed their origins to the Lydians, the early history of rubber is solely a story of the ‘New World’, centred around the equatorial regions of South America and Mexico. The Mesoamerican civilisations of Central America are divided into three periods, although there is some disagreement about the exact dates involved. The Pre-classic or Formative Period is taken as being from around 2000 bc to ad 300, whilst the Classic Period, representing the golden age of the Maya, covered the years ad 300 to ad 900. The Post-classic Period covers the decline of the Maya from 900 to the early years of the sixteenth century and the arrival of the Spanish.

2

Tears of the Tree

During these three periods there were numerous social units which developed, thrived for varying times, and then collapsed. The Mesoamerican era started with the ‘corn people’ or Mokaya who, as their name implies, are believed to be the first settled communities, as opposed to hunter–gatherer tribes. The Mokaya were followed by the Olmecs (c. 1500–300 bc), whose name means ‘rubber people’. The reasons for this are not fully understood, but may have been due to the significance to them of the famous Mesoamerican ball game which we know was played in formal ball courts from as early as 1600 bc and which represents the earliest certain use of natural rubber. Today the Olmecs are best known for their massive sculptures of individual heads, weighing up to forty tons each. These are now believed to be individual ‘portraits’ of their leaders which were disfigured on their deaths. The Olmec region was south of the Gulf of Mexico around La Venta in Tabasco and San Lorenzo, Tenochtitlan and Laguna de los Cerros in Veracruz. To talk of the Mesoamerican ball game is, perhaps, being a little simplistic since the game has a history extending over many centuries. It was played in Mexico (tlachtli), where it was seen and described by the conquistadors, by the Maya (pok-ta-pok), and by the islanders of the Greater Antilles (Batey). In all, the ball game is known to have extended as far south as Paraguay and north into what is now Arizona. Over a considerable timescale involving so many different and developing cultures it is inevitable that local variations would appear. The ‘game’ which the conquistadors saw and wrote of in the sixteenth century certainly seems to have differed in several ways from those played much earlier in the area’s cultural development. Our knowledge of the older versions of the game is obtained from classic art and archaeology. The ball courts were built in the shape of a capital ‘I’, with the length varying from that of a tennis

The Mesoamericans and the ‘All-American Ball Game’

3

Fig. 1.1 Classical design of a ball court at Yagul.

court to a football field or longer, see Fig. 1.1. The central flat strip was narrow when compared with the length and both sides were flanked by sloping banks which were used to keep the ball in play, rather like the sloping rooves of a real tennis court. At each end were markers, possibly indicating the ‘goal line’, and a later refinement was the incorporation of eyes or rings, one on each side, set in the top of the sloping banks, see Fig. 1.3. Most courts were aligned north–south and some locations had a number of different sized courts. The record seems to be held by El Tajin in Veracruz which had eleven courts, whilst one of the most famous Mayan ruined towns known today, Chichen Itza, had at least five. Here a great ‘wishing well’ has been excavated which was found to contain many sacrificial items (including human remains), rubber figurines, and torches with rubber cores which were burnt to generate thick black smoke, possibly to suggest rain clouds—homeopathic

Tears of the Tree 4 witchcraft! The earliest ‘written’ records which refer to natural rubber in the Americas are Aztec picture writings dating from the sixth century ad which show that rubber was used as a material for paying tributes and was also associated with devil-worship. Whilst most ball courts are in prominent positions near the cultural/religious centres of towns, some have been found at the boundaries between adjacent kingdoms, and it has been postulated that these could have been used for battles between rulers’ champions to settle ‘inter-kingdom’ rivalries and disputes. Teams varied in size from two to six and the general idea seemed, initially, to be to get the solid rubber ball, which varied in size from four to twelve inches in diameter, past the opponents’ ‘goal line’. The ball had to be kept in the air and all parts of the body could be used except the hands and feet. Each player wore protective clothing, knee and elbow pads, as well as a carved wooden or leather ‘yoke’ around his waist with which, by swivelling his hips, he could hit the ball with considerable force.

Fig. 1.2 Mayan ball players.


5 Although all experts agree that hands and feet could not be used, two eighth-century Mayan sculptures show players holding the ball—half time? Points were scored for ‘goals’ and also if the opponents allowed the ball to touch the central flat playing area. With the advent of the rings, additional points were scored if the ball could be projected through the ring, see Fig. 1.3. By the time that the Spanish saw the game being played, they were treated to an ‘all fun and games’ version, with one writer describing how it was the custom for any player who succeeded in putting the ball through a ring to be awarded the clothes and jewellery of any spectator(s) whom he could catch.

Fig. 1.3 Ball court at Uxmal. Close-up of the ring.

6

Tears of the Tree

Cortez was so amused by the game that he took two teams (and some balls) back to Spain with him, where they were painted by the German artist, Weiditz. Although the Spanish were presented with a purely sporting activity, a study of Mayan carvings and pottery shows that the history of the ball game had considerable religious significance and was also bound up with ritual sacrifice. For instance, a relief in Izapa shows a decapitated (presumably defeated) ball-game player at the feet of the victor who holds his decapitated head, whilst a relief at El Tajin shows the classic Mayan scene of the loser having his heart cut out as an offering to the underworld to release the Sun for another cycle. There are many references to defeated warriors being forced to play against their captors prior to execution. We do not know if they were freed if they won, but in one illustration the losers were rolled up into balls and then rolled down an adjacent pyramid to their death. The use of the decapitated head, encased in rubber, as a ball is described in the Mayan ‘Council Book’—the Popol Vuh—and is illustrated in the fraction shown in Fig. 1.4 from a more descriptive illustration. The head is seen in profile within the ball. The religious significance of the ball game is most completely described in the Popol Vuh and the actual game, as played in the ball court, is a re-enactment of Mayan mythology, with the movement of the ball representing the cyclic journeys of the Sun and Moon through the sky, sinking to Earth only to rise again. The Mayan civilisation, which extended from around 1000 bc to ad 1500, had its origins in those Mokaya who moved further south and west, occupying the lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsular, with its most famous town of Chichen Itza, and the highlands of Southern Chiapas and Guatemala. The Maya created extensive cities built with carved and shaped stone, even though they were


7

Fig. 1.4 Severed head inside a Mayan ball.

without metal tools or wheels to assist in the transportation of building materials. Their architecture is at least comparable with that of the ancient Egyptians. The cities contained many ball courts, some dating back to the earliest days of their emergence. In the highlands of Guatemala is the ancient town of Quiche´, the home of the Quiche´ Maya. The Popol Vuh is superficially their history, starting from before the dawn of life with the ‘divine matchmaker’, Xpiyacoc, and his wife, the ‘divine midwife’, Xmucane, who are the oldest of the gods. The saga continues from myth through history to conclude in the mid-1550s, at the time of its writing. It is, however, much more than just folklore and the Quiche´ Maya believed that within it lay the answers to all of life. It was consulted at the meetings of their council and this gave it its name—the ‘Council Book’. The ages of the stories are unknown but must date from the beginnings of the Mayan empire.

8

Tears of the Tree

The book was written anonymously in alphabetical Mayan, rather than in hieroglyphics, by high-ranking Maya who, ironically, had been taught the alphabet by missionaries so that they could read the scriptures! At the very beginning of the eighteenth century Francisco Xineńez, a priest, saw the manuscript and copied it, dividing each page in two, down the centre, so that he could add a Spanish translation opposite the Mayan text. After many travels this manuscript eventually came to rest in Chicago in the year 1911. The significance of the book to the history of natural rubber is the prominence given within it to the ancient Mesoamerican ball game. Xpiyacoc and Xmucane had twin sons, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, and, bearing in mind that the characters are all gods, they jointly fathered with Blood Moon another set of twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. These five characters are the heroes and their adventures take place before the gods had managed to create humans. Both sets of twins play the ball game and the book follows an interwoven pattern of stories centred around the game and the battles they have with other gods. The individual episodes do not follow in chronological order, but are broadly divided into their adventures above ground and in the underworld. There are more complications in that, whilst the characters are generally treated as being on a terrestrial plane, the tales can also be interpreted at the celestial/astronomical/astrological levels, with various characters being (or becoming) stars. Places have both terrestrial and celestial significance. The episodes therefore tell of the creation of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars in human terms, whilst the tales provide an astrological ‘clock’ or calendar on which the Quiche´ Maya based their life. The battle of Hunahpu and Xbalanque with the gods ends in their death, which is interpreted as their victory since they are reborn


9 as the Moon and Sun. The tests to which Blood Moon are put have celestial significance as they define the phases of the Moon. The Popol Vuh clearly shows that the ball game was a central part of the Mayan culture and provides firm documentary evidence of its religious significance. In referring to rubber as the ‘blood of sacrifice’ it provides evidence that at least some ball games were played as re-enactments of the sagas told in the book and that the vanquished players were sacrificed, whilst the word the Quiche´ use today for a graveyard is ‘jom’, the word used in the book for the ball court. Continuing the history of the Mesoamerican peoples, we find that to the north-west of the Olmecs was the cultural region of Teotihuacan, which began around 200 bc and which lasted for some 900 years. It was located in the central section of the Valley of Teotihuacan, which is on a 2000-metre plateau in the eastern part of the basin of Mexico. Teotihuacan was a trading state and data indicate that there were well-developed trading routes throughout Mesoamerica, with the Teotihuacans spreading their economic and ideological influence across the whole area. In ad 700 Teotihuacan was destroyed by tribes from the north, and this gave rise to a cultural wilderness which lasted until the rise of the Toltecs some 250 years later. The Toltecs were a warrior people who were important in that they maintained and extended the Teotihuacan culture. Their name is not a tribal name but simply means ‘craftsman’ in the Nahua language of Mexico, and it was used to distinguish those Mexican peoples who retained the culture and characteristics of the Teotihuacan peoples from others. By now the Mayan civilisation was in decline and the Toltecs expanded into large areas of their territory. The resulting culture is called ‘Toltec–Mayan’ and its greatest centre was at Chichen Itza on the Yucatan Peninsula. Around ad 1200, their dominance over the region faded.

10

Tears of the Tree

The last great period of cultural unification came under the Aztecs who, by the end of the Mesoamerican era in the fifteenth century, had built the most complex urban culture in Native American history. According to their own legends, the Aztecs (also known as the Mexica or Tenochca) came from north or north-west Mexico and were originally a group of tribal peoples living on the margins of ‘civilised’ Mesoamerica. In the thirteenth century they settled in the central basin of Mexico where they eventually found refuge on the small islands in Lake Texcoco. Here, in 1325, they founded the town of Tenochtitlan, some 60 km south-west of the site of Teotihuacan. They then set about creating an empire which, during the fifteenth century, was only surpassed in size (in the Americas) by that of the Incas in Peru. The Aztecs are the most extensively documented of all the Mesoamerican civilisations as Spanish soldiers, priests, and historians left numerous reports of all aspects of their life and culture. These showed them to have a highly sophisticated intellectual and religious outlook on life which placed their society as an integral part of the cosmos. The urban structure was based on individual specialisation, which included administrators, traders, and agronomists. The administrative structure was financed by tributes and it is recorded that their last king, Montezuma, received, inter alia, 16 000 balls of rubber each year as part of this. Although the ball game appears to have covered a vast area, the same is not true for the artefacts manufactured by the natives of the Amazon or Peruvian regions, which did not spread in the same way, possibly because they had much more practical and/or religious values. One example was the use of rubber for the manufacture of shoes. The Amazonian native was concerned with protecting his feet and did this by a straight over-dipping process, with his feet as the mould, to produce a perfectly fitting pair of galoshes. In the more civilised (questionably) courts of Mexico


11 joke shoes were made in such a way that it was impossible to walk on them without tottering and falling over. They were used to shoe the dwarfs and hunchbacks who provided light relief for their lords and masters. Perhaps the most unusual recorded use was by the women of the Huitoto tribe of the upper Putumayo who coated their newborn children with latex to keep them warm immediately after their birth. On 21 April 1519 Montezuma was musing on Aztec folklore, which predicted that on that day the fearsome god Quetzalcoatl would return to claim his kingdom. He would arrive by ship from the east, would have a light skin, a black beard, and be robed in black. Later in the day, Fernando Cortez arrived at the court of Montezuma in Tenochtitlan and the Mesoamerican era was essentially over. However, by this time the natives over a vast region of equatorial America had developed processes for manufacturing articles from rubber which were at the forefront of technological innovation and which would take the ‘developed world’ a further 300 years or more to improve upon. The basis of many of these processes involved a controlled combination of drying and sterilising the latex products by smoking them over fires fuelled with certain nuts.

2 Europe goes West The prehistory of rubber took many years to deduce and resulted from archaeological excavations carried out right through to modern times and which are, indeed, ongoing today. The earliest ‘Western’ references to natural rubber inevitably involve Christopher Columbus, but the honour for the first certain reference to rubber in print belongs to Pietro, Martire d’Anghiera, who talked of ‘gummi optima’, and described how it was obtained from certain trees as a white juice which dried to a transparent material, the properties of which were improved by fumigation. For a few years the literature flowed. In 1535 Captain Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo gave a detailed description of the ball games played in the Greater Antilles, whilst Antonio de Herrera Tordesillas described how Cortez had watched such a game at the court of Montezuma. Probably the first and certainly one of the most prescient references to appear in popular print can be found in The alchemist, written by Ben Jonson in 1610. The character Sir Epicure Mammon, in describing the luxuries he would get when he had the secrets of the philosopher’s stone, said, ‘I will have all my beds blown up as down is too hard’; a remarkable flight of fancy because no suitable material existed at that time to contain the air. It was only in 1615 that Torquemada wrote of how his men discovered, or were shown by the South American natives, how to waterproof

Europe goes West

13 their capes by dipping them in the juice from certain trees—what we today call latex. We might not yet have a material for Sir Epicure Mammon but it is on the way. Torquemada also described the making of footwear, bottles, and a variety of hollow goods by the process of dipping over clay formers and then breaking out the latter. The medicinal properties of oil distilled from rubber were documented, including its efficacy in stopping haemorrhages when taken internally. His description of the relationship between rubber and devil-worship and other barbaric rites tied in closely with the Aztec picture writings mentioned earlier. He also included the first observations relating to the collection of the milky fluid. The (correct type of ) tree had its trunk incised with an axe and, from this, the fluid flowed. It was usually collected in special vessels but, if none was available, the natives would cover their skin with it and, when it had dried, peel it off in sheets. Perhaps this is why the natives had relatively hairless bodies! In 1653 Cobo wrote about coating long stockings with latex to protect his legs when walking in the tropical jungle, and the extension of this practice to hats and boots developed into an established industry in Mexico by the late eighteenth century. In the 1790s latex-coated fabric bags were manufactured to transport mercury. These replaced the chamois leather bags that had previously been used; a development much approved of by the chamois. However, for now, neither the reports nor the rubber products which came out of the Americas stimulated more than a passing interest in Spain or Portugal. The latter were simply regarded as curiosities, whilst there was no appreciation of the commercial landslide which was shortly to come. From 1615 to 1736 there appears a literary void, but from the latter date the start of the Western rubber industry can be set. This was due to the activities of two Frenchmen, Charles Marie de la Condamine (1701–1774) (see Fig. 2.1) and François

14

Tears of the Tree

Fig. 2.1 Charles Marie de la Condamine.

Fresneau (unfortunately, the biographer of François Fresneau, his great-grandson, The Compte de Chaseloup Loubat, states that there is no known portrait or other illustration of Frensneau). La Condamine was an exceptional gentleman of the eighteenth century. Born at the turn of the eighteenth century, he was a soldier, social climber, dilettante, and poet, but he was also a friend of Voltaire’s and had interests in chemistry, astronomy, and botany. He studied mathematics at the Jesuit

Europe goes West

15 College of Louis-le-Grand in Paris. On leaving the College, he joined the French army when war broke out. Although he was recognised for his bravery, he soon decided that army life did not suit him. In 1730 he joined the Acade´mie Royale des Sciences and sailed to Algiers followed by Alexandria, Palestine, Cyprus, and Constantinople, where he remained for five months. On his return to Paris, he published mathematical and physical observations of his voyage. In 1735 he joined an expedition to Peru to measure the length of a degree of meridian at the equator. The expedition was led by Louis Godin and the third scientist was Bouguer. The three arrived by different routes, la Condamine going overland from Manta, and the other two sailing to Quito where they joined up. Soon after his arrival in Quito, in 1736, la Condamine sent a package of rubber to the Acade´mie with a long memoir describing many aspects of its origins and production. These included the words ‘He´ve´’ as the name of the tree from which the milk or ‘latex’ flowed, and the name given to the material by the Maninas Indians, namely ‘cahuchu’ or ‘caoutchouc’. La Condamine’s word ‘caoutchouc’ is generally taken to be based on the Indian ‘caa ochu’—‘the tree that weeps’—but, in view of the early religious significance of rubber, it is interesting to note that in a dictionary of the Kechuan language of the ancient Incas, written by Holguin in 1608, he translated ‘cauchu’ as ‘he who casts the evil eye’, whilst other writers have also noted the connection between the word and things magical. It has also been related to a native word for blood, and this could complete the circle to the weeping (bleeding) tree romanticised by Vicki Baum. Regardless of which is correct (and both could be), these are the likely origins of the current German and French words ‘kautschuk’ and ‘caoutchouc’.

16

Tears of the Tree

La Condamine later described the smoking process by which the natives made the rubber stable and the wide range of goods which were produced, including the following: They [the natives on the banks of the Amazon] make bottles of it in the shape of a pear, to the neck of which they attach a fluted piece of wood. By pressing them, the liquid they contain is made to flow out through the flutes and, by this means, they become real syringes.

From this the Portuguese called the tree ‘pao de Xiringa’ (syringe wood) and the rubber tappers or harvesters ‘Seringueiros’. The tree which la Condamine called ‘He´ve´’ we now know as ‘Castilloa elastica’, but he did not realise that the one he described a decade later, the ‘pao de Xiringa’ or Seringa tree, was different. The use by the Portuguese of words derived from the native syringe was extensive. Not only are the labourers called ‘seringueiros’, but the village which is the centre of their daily toil is called a ‘seringal’. The emphasis on one particular instrument which the Indians manufactured is possibly due to the uses to which the syringes were put. La Condamine said that at any banquet or meal with the Omaguan natives it would be impolite not to offer each guest a syringe filled with hot water to be used before sitting at table. He does not go into details, but the sentence is part of a section on medical practices. Fordyce Jones swallows his scruples and mentions enema syringes as being produced by the Amazonian Indians, and at least one author has queried as to whether coming into contact with these practices might have been the origin of ‘The great American sense of humour’. ‘Latex’, the word used by la Condamine to describe the juice of the tree, was derived from the Spanish word for milk and remains in use to this day.

Europe goes West

17 Godin, Bouguer, and la Condamine were soon involved in arguments which resulted in them all making (different) independent measurements. The work was completed in 1743 and the three began their returns by different routes. La Condamine decided to travel east, following the Amazon to the coast. He did not find the female warriors he had heard tell of, the Amazons from which the river’s name comes. The Amazons were first described by Francisco de Orellana who had followed the same route two hundred years earlier, fleeing from Pizarro, when he was attacked by long-haired natives dressed in simple shifts whom he assumed (erroneously) to be female. However, la Condamine did write the first scientific account of the Amazon which was later published as the Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi a l’e´quateur in 1751. In Guiana he met François Fresneau, who was an engineer by profession and a botanist by inclination. Fresneau became fascinated with la Condamine’s rubber and was the first person to realise that this was a potentially useful industrial material. François Fresneau (1703–1770) was an unlikely soulmate for la Condamine. He was born in the house which his mother had brought with her as her dowry when she married François’ father, also called François, in 1700. It, and the town of Cayenne in French Guiana, were to be his physical and spiritual homes for much of his life. In 1726 he moved to Paris to study mathematics and drawing under M. Duplessis, and after two years became a certified engineer. A very severe attack of smallpox interrupted his studies and left him permanently disfigured (perhaps the reason for the lack of paintings or sketches of him), but he recovered and went on to become a certified astronomer in 1730. Soon afterwards he went to stay at the house of the Marquise d’Ambres, whose husband was the Lieutenant Geńe´ral de la Haute-Guyenne, where he was to draw up plans to restore his family home, ‘La Gataudie`re’. The

Tears of the Tree 18 Marquise was to be his protector until her death some thirty years later. One of her first actions was to introduce him to the ‘Minister of the Marine’—Maurepas—who obtained for him in August 1732 the post of engineer at Cayenne in Guiana with a specified brief both to design and construct new fortifications for the town and to investigate the local flora in the hope of finding some new plants for the ‘Jardin du Roy’. He set off for the New World in late 1732, and by 1733 had written to the Minister describing the poor state of repair of the fortifications and given his ideas as to how they should be reconstructed. Three years of frustration followed as political in-fighting took place in France, but in 1736 the plans were approved by the King. He was still unable to begin work in Guiana so, in the winter of 1737/38 he returned to his home, ‘La Gataudie`re’, where he met Cećile Solain-Baron whom he married on 10 June 1738. The two of them returned to Guiana, again to be involved in political manoeuvrings, until on 9 November 1740 it was made clear to everyone by Maurepas that the plans had the King’s approval and must go ahead immediately. Money was made available and he was at last able to start work. He was now content in this area of his brief and felt able to pursue the second part of it, namely to examine the flora of Guiana. It was during this period that he and la Condamine met and carried out their first scientific research together. However, by now la Condamine was keen to return to France and pick up his social life after a ten year absence. He returned with many notes, 200 natural history specimens and works of art, and found time to write six books on his experiences. It is worth noting that la Condamine also found and reported on the cinchona tree, another ‘white man’s miracle tree’ which was later ‘transplanted’ to the east by Sir Clements Markham to provide a source of quinine.

Europe goes West

19 Meanwhile, Fresneau continued his work, and in a letter to Maurepas dated 19 February 1746 he made his first reference to the milk of a tree which the Portuguese used to make a variety of objects (including syringes). However, in France it was regarded as just a curiosity within a long report on the various flora which could be transplanted to the ‘Jardin du Roy’. In 1748 Fresneau returned to France in ill health to find his wife dead, worn out by seven pregnancies and life in Guiana. It was whilst recovering at Marennes that he wrote his first ‘memoire’ describing the physical properties of rubber and how he saw its potential for uses in the west. He particularly emphasised the benefits for France and Guiana in its promotion. The memoire went to the new Minister for the Colonies, Rouille´, in the summer of 1749. He was not interested, but it eventually fell into the hands of The Academy of Science in Paris and thence to la Condamine who, having known and worked briefly with Fresneau, gave it his support and presented it to the Academy on 21 February 1751. In the same year Fresneau married Anne-Marie Horric de Laugerie and the two of them, together with Fresneau’s only surviving child, Charles, settled in Marennes to rebuild ‘La Gataudie`re’. The re-build included a laboratory on the ground floor, where he could continue his research into rubber, and particularly his search for a solvent which would enable him to prepare solutions which could be used for dipping, coating, etc. in the same way that fresh latex was used in Amazonia. This research continued for a number of years and gradually some interest was shown by the Government. In 1762 Vaucanson asked M. Bertin, the Controller-General of Finances, to write to Fresneau asking him to set down the results of his labours, and this he duly produced in February 1763, a document of some note, being the first scientific research paper on natural rubber. With the documents was a letter explaining that he had prepared

Tears of the Tree 20 waterproof fabrics by dipping the materials in solutions of rubber with turpentine as a solvent. Having received a ‘thank you’ from Bertin and nothing more, Fresneau asked his old friend, la Condamine, if his research could be presented to the Academy of Science. La Condamine said there would be no problem, but suggested that it should be rewritten as a scientific paper rather than retaining its existing form as a report to the minister. This Fresneau did and it was submitted in March 1765. However, at some time in 1763, two scientist friends of M. Bertin, He´rrisant and Macquer, claimed independently to have discovered turpentine as the best solvent for rubber, and they went down in history for that discovery. Unfortunately, there is no documentation in the Academy’s records for the year 1763 of their submissions, so we are left to wonder whether they had a private briefing from Bertin or whether it was just a coincidence! Fresneau certainly believed the former, as an exchange of letters between himself and Macquer clearly shows. Perhaps Britain had

Fig. 2.2 La Gataudie`re.

Europe goes West

21 a hand in Macquer’s good fortune; in 1766 Macquer had published his famous Dictionnaire de chymie which, incidentally, contained no mention of rubber, and this was translated into English by a ‘lunatic’—or more correctly, James Kier, a knowledgeable chemist and member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. The translated dictionary was extremely well received and brought Macquer to the attention of the British scientific community which subsequently published his work, again in English translation. Fresneau, on the other hand, received little appreciation outside his native country. That was how things stood when François Fresneau died on 25 June 1770. However, his work had raised natural rubber from a passing curiosity to a useful industrial raw material, and he should be given his long overdue recognition for realising and developing its potential. It is gratifying to note that at the end of the twentieth century his greatgrandson, the Compte de Chassloup Loubat, restored ‘La Gataudie`re’, including Fresneau’s laboratory, to its former glory and it is now open to the public. It can be found at Marennes, near La Rochelle in south-west France (see Fig. 2.2).

3 What’s in a Name? At this point it is appropriate to consider what plants provide us with latex (hence rubber), the varieties which exist, and their relative merits to the rubber collectors of two centuries ago. Natural rubber, India rubber, or caoutchouc are all names for the solid elastic material isolated, one way or another, from the ‘milk’ or latex of various plants. Whilst these plants tend to occur in the tropics, there are many which grow in the temperate zones and also produce this material, although not in any commercial sense. Perhaps the most common sources in the UK are the dandelion and the goldenrod—snap their stalks and the white fluid is latex, which will dry to give rubber. Latex is therefore the white milklike fluid which is obtained by wounding the plant. In the case of the most common commercial source today, the tree Hevea braziliensis, a sloping incision is cut in the outer bark from which the latex will ‘bleed’ and the wound is refreshed by removing slivers from the surface of the cut on subsequent tapping days. The word ‘rubber’ itself did not come into use until the 1770s when Joseph Priestly observed that Nairne’s of London (an artists’ materials shop) was selling a half-inch cube of material for erasing pencil marks for three shillings. He called it ‘India rubber’, having found from whence it came, but it was another hundred or more years before this was adopted by scientists who preferred the ‘classical’ caoutchouc. The 1868 edition of Chambers encyclopaedia

What’s in a Name?

23 enters the material under ‘caoutchouc’, whilst the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1876 enters it under ‘rubber’, and in the same year a chapter in Bevan’s volumes on British manufacturing industries is headed ‘Guttapercha and India-rubber’. From then on the word ‘rubber’ is used in the UK. Popular usage of the word became commonplace much earlier. Charles Dickens, writing in the Pickwick papers in 1837, describes how the lines on Mr Pickwick’s brow melted away: ‘like the marks of a blacklead pencil beneath the softening influence of India rubber’, and that Mr Dowler, ‘bounced off the bed as abruptly as an India-rubber ball’. In the twentieth century the application of this one word (rubber) expanded in common usage to include an ever-growing range of synthetic elastomers, something we shall return to later. It is interesting to look at the origins of the word ‘caoutchouc’ a little closer, but first let us consider the names of the trees from which this material comes as this also provides an interesting story. Fernando Hernandez produced a great survey of the natural resources of Mexico in the 1570s (Rerum medicarum bovae Hispaniae thesaures) which was only published in 1649. Here he wrote extensively about the rubber-producing tree which is today identified as Castilla elastica. He wrote: When the bark is tapped a gum flows out which is called ‘holli’ by the Indians . . . the gum is so resilient that, properly prepared and shaped into round balls, these balls can be used for the same purpose as our Spanish inflated leather balls.

In 1723, Father A. J. de la Neuville wrote of the peculiar gum (rubber) which the Indians of French Guiana used to make various artefacts and ornaments. He made no comments about the origins of the gum and had probably therefore not seen its collection, but,

Tears of the Tree 24 from his description, it seems likely that it was obtained from a vine of the order of Apocynaceae—probably landolphia. The Castilla elastica was also the tree described by la Condamine, and from this came the rubber samples which he sent to France in the 1730s. However, a decade later he saw the ‘syringe tree’ and did not realise it was different. Almost certainly, he had not seen the original Castilla but had only heard reports of it. It was this ‘syringe tree’ which François Fresneau found in French Guiana and wrote about to la Condamine and the Paris Academy of Science. By a pure fluke he appears to have found the one and only Hevea braziliensis in that country, and it is not surprising that his drawings caused confusion some time later. He did not give it its current name but just referred to the ‘enema tree’, after the stories of the uses to which the syringes prepared from the ‘syringe tree’ were put. Pierre Barre`re can lay claim to having been the second Western person to have actually seen rubber being produced. In 1743 he belatedly published his survey of the natural resources of French Guiana, in which he described how natives made the same rubber articles as those described by la Neuville from the milk obtained from a vine which he identified as belonging to the order of Apocynaceae. Since he was in French Guiana between 1721 and 1724, this must have predated the observations of la Condamine. In 1775 J. C. F. Aublet published a book on the plants of French Guiana, and in it he recorded a ‘rubber tree’ which we now know could not have been the same as Fresneau’s. However, at that time, Aublet believed that his tree, la Condamine’s, and Fresneau’s were the same. He came up with the name ‘Hevea peruviana’, thus giving la Condamine credit for his early discoveries. With a second thought, he then reasoned that, since he had not seen la Condamine’s tree but only the ones in French Guiana, he had better play safe, so he renamed his tree ‘Hevea guyanensis’

What’s in a Name?

25 (its present name). This upset many people who objected to a ‘localised’ name being given to a tree found all over the north of South America. At the same time, Aublet was castigating Fresneau for the poor quality of his sketches which looked nothing like his (Aublet’s) tree. One of Aublet’s other claims to fame was that he was the first Westerner to eat rubber seeds and, whilst finding them quite oily, was not averse to them. In 1794 Vincente Cervantes presented a paper at the Royal Botanical Gardens on the various rubber-producing trees of Mesoamerica and suggested that the trees of the Brazilian and Mexico rubber industries were different. It seemed to get little in the way of publicity and it was left to the Dutchman, Arnoud Juliaans, to study all the literature and shout the obvious for the world to see—THERE WERE AT LEAST TWO DIFFERENT TREES! The name Castilla elastica has been used earlier but its origins should be given here. Juan Diego del Castillo was a botanist who joined Cervantes in Mexico. He died there in 1793 aged fortynine, and left a considerable sum of money towards the printing of their projected book Flora Mexicana. Cervantes chose the name Castilla elastica in honour of his friend. In 1807 Persoon called the ‘syringe’ or ‘enema’ tree ‘Siphonia elastica’, whilst in 1811 Willdenhow, Director of the Berlin Botanical Gardens, came up with the name ‘Hevea braziliensis’. The dispute was only resolved in 1865/66 by Mu¨ller, who suppressed ‘Siphonia’ in favour of Willdenhow’s name which illustrated the Aztec origins of rubber technology and the geographical location of the tree. It is now appreciated that Hevea braziliensis is almost completely located south of the river Amazon in northwest Brazil, north Bolivia, and east Peru, whilst other rubberproducing trees of the genus Hevea are located north of the river to a latitude of about 6 N.

26

Tears of the Tree

Having dealt with the trees, we can now consider the material which we get from them. There are four New World native words for rubber and these are written as ‘Cauchuc’ (or caoutchouc), ‘Hevea’, ‘Olli’, and ‘Kik’. It has been said that there is a relationship between ‘caoutchouc’ and devil-worship and sacrifice but, before considering this, let us deal with the three other words. ‘Kik’ is a word from the Mayan language of the Yucatan Peninsula and means ‘blood’. It has never been used in the west to refer to rubber. ‘Olli’ comes from the Nahuatl language of ancient Mexico and, because of the locations of the various rubber-bearing trees, always refers to the Castilloa elastica. This is obviously the root of the current Mexican word for rubber—Ule. ‘Hevea’ was la Condamine’s word taken from the Ecuadorian Indians for the rubber-bearing tree itself, and has never been used in modern times to mean rubber. The modern word for rubber in Peru and Ecuador is jebe. This brings us to ‘Cauchuc/caoutchouc’, which is important in that it is the basis for the current French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian words for the material—and is complicated as it seems to have origins in at least four different languages. The Maı¨nas Indians of Peru have the word meaning ‘juice of a tree’, whilst other authorities have identified the word with the Tupi Indians of the Brazilian Amazon and also the word ‘Caucciu´’ from the Caribbean. Each could, of course, be relevant depending on which explorer met which native! The interpretation publicised by Vicki Baums’s eponymous novel Weeping wood is that of W. H. Johnson, who claims that ‘caoutchouc’ is a corruption of ‘caaocho’, itself derived from ‘Caa’, meaning ‘wood’, and ‘o-cho’, meaning ‘to run’ or ‘weep’. Perhaps the final word should lie with the Kechuan language of the Peruvian Incas as this was the most developed of four

What’s in a Name?

27 Indian languages. Here the 1608 dictionary of Diego Gonzalez Holguin translates ‘cauchu’ as ‘he who casts an evil eye’, whilst in 1653 Bernabe´ Cobo noted that the Mexican ‘olli’ and the Peruvian ‘cauchuc’ refer to the same material obtained from Castilloa elastica. It should be remembered that applications of rubber to witchcraft, sorcery, and ritual sacrifice (as well as the ball game) predate its more utilitarian uses. (a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Fig. 3.1 (a) Hevea braziliensis, (b) Castilloa elastica, (c) Ficus elastica, and (d) Landolphia owariensis.

28

Tears of the Tree

Other rubber-producing trees of historical interest are listed below. For various reasons, none challenged the Hevea braziliensis (see Fig. 3.1(a)) which today produces virtually all of the natural rubber used worldwide.

Castilloa (elastica and ulei): The former is found in Central America and Mexico (see Fig. 3.1(b)), the latter in Peru and Brazil. Manihot glaziovii: From the Ceara region of Brazil. Ficus elastica: Found in Java and Malaysia (see Fig. 3.1(c)). Landolphia: Creepers found mainly in the Congo basin (see Fig. 3.1(d)). Funtumia elastica: Found in West Africa. The following are also of related note:

Parthenium argentatum: A shrub producing guayule, which is regularly re-examined as a possible source of ‘local’ natural rubber by the US. It is found naturally in the arid regions of Mexico and the rubber has to be solvent-extracted. Dyera costulata: Found in Malaysia and Sumatra—gives jelutong, used in chewing gum. Genus dichopsis: Produces gutta-percha. Mimusops globosa: Yields balata. First harvested commercially in Guiana in 1863 and used for golf balls, insulation, etc. Today the Macushi Indians of Guiana carve animals from it which are sold to sustain their rural communities and lifestyle.

4 The Battles of the Giants—Charles Goodyear The first of our giants is Charles Goodyear who was born at Oyster Point, close to New Haven, Connecticut, in December 1800. Five years later the family moved to Union City, which would eventually become Naugatuck, and here his father, Amasa, opened a mill which manufactured a range of agricultural implements. Charles had two brothers and a sister Harriet. When he was sixteen an event occurred which was to be significant throughout much of his life; his father hired a tutor, William DeForest, who later successfully moved into wool (then rubber) manufacturing and also married Harriet. He was to be Goodyear’s ‘angel’ and supporter for the rest of Goodyear’s life. Goodyear initially entered the hardware business with his father but, after marrying Clarissa Beecher, moved to Philadelphia to set up his own hardware business. It was now 1826. By 1830 he had prospered and had three daughters, but it was a false dawn. His naive business sense, coupled with a downturn in the economy, left him hopelessly in debt and he enjoyed the first of many visits to a debtors’ prison. In 1831 he was declared bankrupt, lost the store, his rights in his father’s business, and a daughter born that year died shortly after. In 1833 his first son, Charles Junior,

Tears of the Tree 30 was born, but soon after his third-born daughter (Sarah) died, a pattern of good followed by bad news which was to follow him throughout his life. During this time he had tried to make ends meet by various inventions, but here his second fatal character flaw showed itself—he could have an idea but was unable to progress it to an end product. It should, perhaps, also be noted that he had a third flaw, although this was physical rather than temperamental. He had been a sickly child whose health never improved throughout his life. In the summer of 1834 he walked past the New York retail store of the Roxbury India Rubber Company, America’s first rubber-manufacturing company, and noticed a rubber life preserver or life jacket on display. It was not the rubber which attracted him but the valve used to inflate it. He thought he could invent a better one, so he took a life preserver home with him, developed an improved valve, and returned to the store to show the manager the valve he had devised. The manager was not interested. The company was not in the market for valves now and it would be lucky to stay in business at all. He showed Goodyear racks of rubber goods which had melted to a stinking gum in the heat. Goodyear disappointedly pocketed the valve and took his first good look at rubber. He experienced a sudden curiosity and wonder about this mysterious material. ‘There is probably no other inert substance’, he said later, ‘which so excites the mind.’ Returning to Philadelphia, Goodyear was clapped into jail for debt. Whilst there he asked his wife to bring him a batch of raw rubber and her rolling pin. In his cell Goodyear worked his first rubber experiments. If rubber was naturally adhesive, he reasoned, why couldn’t a dry powder be mixed with it to absorb its stickiness—perhaps talc or magnesia? Once out of jail, he, his wife, and small daughters made up several hundred pairs of

The Battles of the Giants—Charles Goodyear

31 magnesia-filled rubber overshoes in their kitchen; but, before he could market them, summer came and he watched them sag into shapeless lumps. Life got no better for Goodyear and his family. Borrowed money ran out and they moved to successively poorer rented properties until in 1836 he moved his experiments to New York, where a friend gave him a spare bedroom for his ‘laboratory’. Just before the move a sixth child, William, had been born, but he only lived a few months. Goodyear still persevered with what can only be described as his obsession. He was now adding two drying agents to his rubber, magnesia and quicklime, and improving the product all the time. He had turned to decorating and painting his shoes to hide the sticky surface, and one day he decided to repaint an old decorated sample, so he applied nitric acid to remove its bronze paint. The piece turned black and Goodyear discarded it. A few days later he found it again and realised that the nitric acid had done something to the rubber, making it smooth and no longer sticky. He managed to convince the Roxbury India Rubber Company (which had just managed to stay in business) that he was on to something, and the company gave him access to its factory and raw materials so that he could continue his experiments. Here again his inability to see projects through to completion led to friction and he was eventually told to leave. Soon after came a pivotal event in his life. He met Nathaniel Hayward, who had worked for the Eagle Rubber Company in Easton, Pennsylvania throughout the 1830s. The firm had not been successful and in 1838 Hayward took it over, moving to Woburn, Massachusetts. At that time the reputation of rubber was at rock bottom and Hayward was unable to make a success of his company, so he agreed to turn over the factory to Goodyear in exchange for an agreed contract as foreman. He also agreed to

Tears of the Tree 32 hand over all of his research information. One item was his discovery that dusting rubber sheets with sulphur, or painting the surfaces of the sheets with solutions of sulphur in turpentine and exposing them to sunlight (a process he called ‘solarisation’) ‘causes the gum to dry more perfectly and to improve the whole substance thereof rendering it much superior to that prepared by any other combination therewith.’ This process he patented, at Goodyear’s suggestion, late in 1838 (US Patent 1090 granted 1839), and immediately sold it to Goodyear. Goodyear, rubber, and sulphur had now come together, but he already had in hand a government contract for 150 mailbags which were to be manufactured by the process which involved treating the rubber with nitric acid. After making the bags at Hayward’s old factory in East Woburn, Massachusetts, he relaxed and took his family on vacation. When he returned, the mailbags had melted to a sticky gum! This was another disaster and one which not only forced him back to poverty and made him give up the Eagle mill, but also disillusioned many of his friends and supporters. It could well have been the final debacle which prevented what was to come being his lifeline to fame and fortune. It was now 1839 and Goodyear continued to use sulphur in his experiments as a ‘drying agent’. He made numerous visits to the factory at Woburn for the purpose of closing it down and disposing of its assets and, quoting his own words (Goodyear wrote all of his autobiography in the third party): While on one of the visits above alluded to, at the factory at Woburn, and at the dwelling place where he stopped whenever he visited the manufactory at Woburn, the inventor made some experiments to ascertain the effect of heat upon the same compound that had decomposed in the mail bags and other articles. He was surprised to find that a specimen being carelessly brought


33

in contact with a hot stove charred like leather . . . He however directly inferred that if the process of charring could be stopped at the right point, it might divest the gum of its adhesiveness throughout which would make it better than the native gum . . . India rubber could not be melted in boiling sulphur at any heat ever so great but always charred.

He had made what today we call vulcanised rubber. But now he was very ill and had only taken the first step along the long road of his great invention. He knew that heat and sulphur miraculously changed rubber, but how much heat was needed and for how long? He experimented with hot sand, flat irons, boiling water, and everything he could think of until, at last, he decided that steam under pressure, applied for four to six hours at around 130 C, gave him the best results. Whilst the above quotation from Goodyear’s autobiography actually gives us minimal information about his discovery, other, different, stories abound, although a similar story is told in The Readers Digest of 1958, and shown on the Goodyear Corporation website. (Incidentally, the Goodyear Corporation has nothing to do with Charles Goodyear but used his name when it was founded thirty-eight years after his death.) Others claim that the discovery took place in the laboratory at his house, and certainly the classic picture is more suggestive of a home laboratory than a shop. One ‘domestic’ story tells how, one day, while holding aloft a ladle of his latest failure, Goodyear gave the mixture an angry shake. A glob flew from the ladle and landed on a hot stove. He peeled the rubber concoction off the stove and was amazed at what he had. The heat had changed it. Kneading the small piece in his fingers he found that it was now strong and elastic. Another reads that Goodyear had invited some friends over to show them his ball of gummy rubber. He had managed to harden it by mixing the rubber with sulphur and treating it with an acid gas. As people

Tears of the Tree 34 began to toss the rubber ball around, it accidentally landed on a hot wood stove. The rubber began to melt and Goodyear was terribly upset. However, as he attempted to scrape the rubber off the stove, he discovered it had hardened to the consistency he had been trying to achieve. Yet another ‘domestic’ story involves rubberised fabric, which has some primitive basis in truth as Goodyear himself talks of a subsequent experiment in which he heated some of the treated mailbag fabric—although he claimed to use an open fire—in one attempt to make a better rubber. Goodyear mixed rubber with sulphur and white lead, and painted the mix onto a piece of fabric. Then somebody, no one knows just who, left this piece of rubberised fabric on a hot stove top. Goodyear realised from the smell that the fabric was burning, but before he could throw out the charred remains, he noticed that the material had charred but the rubber had not melted under all that heat, as he would have expected. The problem with the various ‘stove and compounded rubber’ stories which are attached to Charles Goodyear is that he does not seem to be the only claimant for it!. The following letter was written by Morriss Mattson MD to an American friend. It is undated but can be found in The India rubber and gutta-percha and electrical trades journal of 1887. I have been familiar with everything relating to rubber since its first inception as an industrial interest and yet I am free to confess that I do not know what are the current statements as to the true origin of its vulcanisation. It is universally conceded that Mr Goodyear was the discoverer and I have no disposition to pluck a single laurel from his brow, Yet history is uncompromising in her demand, always requiring the exact truth in reference to every great discovery . . . Be it known that the first great movement made in reference to its manufacture was by a Mr Hayward of Boston who discovered that sulphur was a

The Battles of the Giants—Charles Goodyear peculiar drier of rubber, if I may so express myself, and that by mixing the two together the resulting compound could be forced into thin and delicate sheets and fabricated into various useful and beautiful articles. Very soon a store was opened in Boston for the sale of these articles, and I remember that they elicited a great deal of public admiration. Indeed they were ornamented in a very high degree. A Mr Eli was the proprietor of said store and many were the conversations we had in reference to the probable future of this new movement in rubber . . . Mr Goodyear was in the habit of passing in and out of this store, according to my dim recollections, but whether he had an interest in the business I cannot say. He was not then the observer of all observers but simply a very plain, unpretending, citizen, known as the patentee of a few but, perhaps, not very profitable inventions. Mr Eli’s store was heated by an anthracite stove which had a flattened top, and that memorable stove I can see in ‘my mind’s eye’ as though I had visited that little store in Walther Street but yesterday. Nothing was dreamed of in that store but the sulpho-rubber compound, and, of course, they were to be seen scattered in every direction, just as bread and dough are seen in a baker’s kitchen. A small mass of the aforesaid rubber compound had forced its way, by some accident, upon the top of the aforesaid stove. Perhaps it had been used to protect the fingers against the heat in moving the lid of the stove. But this is only a surmise. How long the rubber mass had remained upon the top of the stove I have not the tongue of tradition to give an answer. Let this pass then, as an inscrutable mystery, unless someone can throw more light on the subject than myself. In the meantime Mr Eli was standing beside the stove seeking the genial warmth radiating from the glowing anthracite within. He espied the mass of rubber of which I have spoken and carelessly took it up for examination. To his surprise he found that it was entirely different from the ordinary sulpho-rubber with which he was so familiar. It was entirely changed in texture. It was tough, hard, strong yet elastic. What had produced this change? Surely the heat of the stove. Here was a grand secret, a grand revelation, a grand

35

36

Tears of the Tree discovery; but a discovery by accident, and many of our greatest discoveries come to us by accident. Mr Eli, as I well remember, had a sharp and intuitive mind, and probably was not slow in perceiving that the anthracite stove had flashed forth to the world an unexpected revelation of inconceivable value to the human family. He must have thought about it, dreamed about it, and talked about it and yet I do not remember of his saying anything to me upon the subject beyond the mere recital which I have just given to the reader.

What one makes of these stories, and in particular the last one, is something for the reader to decide. Goodyear certainly knew William Ely of New York as someone who had backed him financially in the late 1830s, but there is no mention of him in this context in his autobiography. It is an inescapable fact that, if only Goodyear had expanded a little on the details of his great discovery, then there would have been much less speculation as to what really happened on that day in 1839. Now let us return to Goodyear’s story. Due to his earlier cries of ‘Wolf ’ he was unable to convince anyone that he had actually achieved something worthwhile and, indeed, in practical commercial terms he had not. All his efforts to produce a consistently vulcanised sheet of rubber ended in failure. In 1842 Goodyear showed Horace Cutler, a shoemaker who had a factory near where Goodyear was working, some of his vulcanised rubber and, when Cutler expressed interest (and offered financial backing) to manufacture rubber overshoes, Goodyear had to point out that he was not actually at a reliable production stage yet—and then went on to prove it. Cutler and Goodyear had split up by late 1842 but, from the ruins of their production, Cutler managed to find a few decent pairs of overshoes which he sold to another rubber manufacturer—Horace Day—in order to get some return on his failed investment.


37 As far as Goodyear was concerned this was a disaster waiting to happen as Day, a hard-nosed businessman, was determined to find out what Goodyear had done to his rubber and to copy him. Unlike Goodyear, who had no interest in money, and certainly no ability to make any, this was Day’s driving ambition, and the two would fight their way through the US courts for many years to come. Day’s first action was to persuade the disillusioned Cutler to come and work for him, on the understanding that he would reveal all that he knew of Goodyear’s process. Cutler soon realised that Day was not a man he wished to work for and left; but, before going, he did agree (for a price) to pass on every bit of information he had about the Goodyear process. Day set out to emulate Goodyear but, like the latter, he was unable to make any products which were of a consistent quality. By now it was mid1843 and we have clear evidence that, whilst Goodyear’s vulcanisation process may on occasion have produced saleable articles, it was hardly a patentable process! Goodyear was probably aware of this and it could well have been one of his reasons for failing to take that route. Like Thomas Hancock, whom we shall come to later with his masticator or ‘pickle’, secrecy during development could have been the best option—if only he could have got the process to work quickly and reliably. By now Goodyear found himself penurious again and back in jail. On his release he realised that he had exhausted his possible partners in America, so he decided to turn to Great Britain which, he knew, had a considerable (unvulcanised) rubber industry but no knowledge of his process of vulcanisation. He employed an Englishman who was living in the US at that time, Mr Stephen Moulton, to act as his agent and to negotiate a deal to sell his secrets there. If he had felt able, on a technical basis, and had had the funds to patent his process before trying to enter the

Tears of the Tree 38 UK market, the story might have been very different. However, he did not, British industry was not impressed, and the UK glory went to Thomas Hancock as we shall see later; but, before following that story up, we shall continue with Goodyear’s. Having learnt a lesson for his UK experiences, Goodyear at last patented his process in the US in early 1844. Ironically, one of the first people to take out a licence to manufacture rubber goods under Goodyear’s vulcanisation patent was the man who had introduced him to rubber and sulphur, Nathaniel Hayward, but he soon transferred this to Gandee and Steele of New Haven, whose company went on to become part of the United States Rubber Company in 1892. In 1844 Hayward and Burr established the Hayward Rubber Company at Lisbon, Connecticut. From here, rubber products, boots, and shoes were shipped all over the country and, although Hayward retired in 1864 because of ill health, the company thrived until 1893 when it was closed. Later the building burned to the ground. Hayward died in 1865 and is buried in the small rural town of Colchester, about sixty miles north-east of New York. This town, today with a population of around 10 000, has a unique place in the history of rubber since in its churchyard is a tombstone and memorial to Nathaniel Hayward, the latter in the shape of a 10 ft high concrete rubber tree trunk, whilst the former identifies him as the inventor of hard rubber (ebonite or vulcanite)—an arguably contentious statement which we shall consider later (see Fig. 4.1). Returning to Goodyear, it was time for his brother-in-law, William DeForest, to come to his rescue again by setting up the Naugatuck Rubber Company (which would go on to become Uniroyal). For a cash sum the company bought the rights to all of Goodyear’s patents, past and future, although he retained the

The Battles of the Giants—Charles Goodyear (a)

39

(b)

Fig. 4.1 (a) Nathaniel Hayward, and (b) his concrete ‘rubber tree’ memorial.

right to sell elsewhere licences to any patent which the company declined to use. The company immediately began to make money and Goodyear was allowed space in the factory to experiment. This, however, soon turned into a disaster as his investigations and demands interfered with the smooth running of the production unit, and he was shown the door. It was time for Horace Day to surface again, and he now dropped any subtlety by applying for a patent which was essentially based on that of Goodyear. It was rejected outright, but Day would not go away and he began to manufacture shirred cloth, although Goodyear had already assigned that licence exclusively to a third party. It was now time for Goodyear to take action against Day in the courts, but they never got there. The two settled and Day received the shirred cloth licence which the third party had sold back to Goodyear. Although this would have made Day a rich man, it was not enough and he began manufacturing a wide range of rubber goods. This was a serious mistake. He was

Tears of the Tree 40 now not just infringing Goodyear’s patent, but manufacturing and marketing goods which were covered by licences issued to a number of rubber companies who did not wish to see their prosperity threatened and had both the money and will to fight. It was now 1851 and Goodyear was in the UK for Queen Victoria’s Great Exhibition. He had borrowed extensively from his brother-in-law to create a propaganda masterpiece, and this he succeeded in doing with the creation of his ebonite rooms—the ‘Goodyear Vulcanite Court’. Ebonite was, after all, a reliable material in his hands. He just kept on heating his mixes until they were rock-hard. However, contrasting with Hancock’s stand, there was relatively little ‘soft’ vulcanised rubber on display. Hancock’s display, on the other hand, concentrated on a vast range of practical vulcanised articles, clearly illustrating the difference in character between the two men; Hancock the industrialist and Goodyear the showman. Both men must have studied each other’s displays with interest, but there is no record of their meeting nor of what they thought of the other’s achievements. Hancock probably admired the quality of Goodyear’s ebonite mouldings but wondered about their commercial practicality, whilst Goodyear no doubt still failed to understand that a creative artist must also make money to live— unless he has enough friends to borrow from—but he was soon back in the States for the battle against Horace Day. This was going to be one of the greatest trials in American history, with Daniel Webster appearing for the rubber companies and Rufus Choate for Day. Both were brilliant orators, with Choate, the younger upstart, fighting Webster, the old lion. The truth would not really matter in this trial of oration; indeed, it featured but rarely. Choate’s defence was that numerous people, all produced in court, had carried out Goodyear’s experiments before he had—one of those being Day himself who claimed to


41 have carried out Goodyear’s exact work as a fourteen-year-old in 1827! These matters were quickly put aside and the manufacturers’ unanswerable question was: if Day knew Goodyear’s patent to be invalid, why did he give it credence by taking out a licence to manufacture shirred cloth in the first place? When summing up, Webster spoke for two days, weaving Goodyear’s sad story of deprivation and suffering into the battle for the American constitution, the authority of Congress, and the rights of man. The verdict was a foregone conclusion. Goodyear’s patent rights were cast in stone and Day was hit hard in both reputation and pocket as the court ordered his factory records to be checked and all monies due to the injured parties to be calculated and paid. Although too long to reproduce here, the full text of Webster’s oration was published in the New York Daily Tribune at the end of 1851. Unfortunately, no record of Choate’s summing up has ever been found. Goodyear’s rubber had now taken off with a vengeance in America and he found himself with time for two new projects. The first (in 1853) was the publication of the first part of his history of rubber: Gum elastic & its varieties with a detailed account of its applications and uses and of the discovery of vulcanization (a catchy title), of which only a very few copies were ever printed, one having rubber pages. The second volume: The applications and uses of vulcanized gum elastic followed later in the same year. A few further copies appear to have been printed in 1855, but, again, these exist only in very specialised collections and the commonly available version today is a facsimile reproduction published in London by The India-rubber journal in 1937. The original appears to have been rushed to print whilst Goodyear was in France preparing for the Paris Exhibition of 1854/55 and contains a number of blanks or dashes to be filled in later. Again, Goodyear’s mercurial flitting from project ‘A’ to ‘B’ had got the better of him!

42

Tears of the Tree

It was in London in 1853, whilst preparing for the Paris Exhibition, that disaster again struck. Goodyear’s ever-supportive wife, Clarissa, took ill and died aged just forty-eight. He poured himself into his preparations, determined to make his display at this exhibition even greater than it was in 1851, and just over a year later he arrived in Paris having found a new wife, a twentyyear-old Englishwoman, Fanny Wardell. It was during this time that Goodyear persuaded George Healy to paint on a sheet of ebonite that which is probably the most recognised painting of him—romanticised and worry-free—a long way from the true picture of the sick man, aged beyond his years, who staggered into Healy’s studio (see Fig. 4.2). Once again, his exhibits were often of ebonite, many carried over from the 1851 Great Exhibition, but with a number of new ones made by French manufacturers to his specification. More

Fig. 4.2 Charles Goodyear.


43 adulation followed and so did the bills. Before the exhibition was over he was experiencing a French debtors’ prison, where he was pleased to receive the ‘Grand Medal of Honour’ and the ‘Cross of the Legion of Honour’, awarded by the Emperor Napoleón III for his contribution to the exhibition. Freed from the French prison, he returned to England where, after another spell in an English debtors’ prison, he was released in time for his court battle with Thomas Hancock. The court found in Hancock’s favour (we shall return to this in more detail later) but Goodyear remained in London, and later Bath, carrying out research using compounded rubber supplied by Stephen Moulton, originally his agent who had brought samples of his vulcanised rubber to England in 1843 and who now had a thriving rubber business at Bradford-on-Avon, near Bath. It was here that family misfortune continued to take its toll with the death of Fanny’s first-born son, but this was compensated for by the birth of a second son, Arthur. As ever, Goodyear was unable to pay Moulton for the rubber with which he was supplied, and by mid-1858 it was obvious that he had exhausted Moulton’s goodwill. He returned to the States, albeit claiming that his return was demanded by his licensees as his patent was soon to expire and they wished him to seek an extension. Needless to say, Horace Day would be there to object, whilst Hancock was also there to oppose Goodyear since expansion into the American market now held many attractions for him and the company he was now associated with—Chas. Macintosh and Co. This time it was Goodyear’s turn to win against Hancock, or, more accurately, for Goodyear to continue his string of victories against Horace Day, and he was awarded a seven-year extension. It has already been said that almost every piece of good news which Goodyear received had to be paid for, and this time it was

44

Tears of the Tree

Fig. 4.3 Charles Goodyear’s tombstone.

with the death of Arthur. A year later Fanny gave birth to a girl, but at virtually the same time Goodyear received news that his second daughter by Clarissa, Cynthia, was seriously ill in New Haven. Goodyear was in Washington and ill himself, but he set out by sea to avoid the rough cross-country journey. When the ship docked in New York he found that he was too late. Cynthia was dead. Charles Goodyear collapsed in grief and died in New York on 1 July 1860 with Fanny at his bedside. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, beneath a massive sepulchre which shouts the single name ‘GOODYEAR’ (see Fig. 4.3).

5 The Battles of the Giants—Thomas Hancock The second giant in the story of rubber vulcanisation is Thomas Hancock, who was as unlike Goodyear as one could imagine. He lived in the same house most of his adult life, he never married but looked after his extended family of nine adopted nieces and nephews, he concentrated on one project at a time, made that work, hopefully made money from it, and researched new ideas in his very limited spare time. He also believed in patents, as we shall see (with one notable exception), and took out a total of fourteen relating to rubber and gutta-percha between 1820 and 1847. One thing he did share with Goodyear was the same fascination, although not obsession, with that sometimes sticky, sometimes brittle, and sometimes even useful material, rubber. Thomas Hancock was born in 1786 in Marlborough, Wiltshire, the third of twelve children born to James and Betty Hancock between 1780 and 1800. This was a remarkable family, although we know little of the children’s formative years except that, as was all too common at that time, several, including four girls, died either in infancy or when relatively young. Their father was a cabinetmaker, and it is probable that Thomas learnt the skills of that trade because sometime after 1815 he appeared in London with his brother John to set up business as a coachbuilder. Only

Tears of the Tree 46 one of his brothers, William, continued the family tradition of cabinet-making, but at least four more of the brothers, including John, deserve mention as having contributed significantly to Britain’s culture and industry in the nineteenth century. Walter, born in 1799, was an engineer who designed and built some of the earliest and most successful of the steam carriages which were appearing on the English roads in the early nineteenth century. Around 1840 he became disillusioned with the prospects for these vehicles and threw in his lot with Thomas, where his engineering abilities enabled him to work on the construction of various pieces of rubber processing and product manufacturing equipment. John, born in 1788, had his own rubber goods and hose factory, where he used equipment designed by Walter to make catheters and other products with medical applications. Unfortunately, he died of consumption in 1835, aged just forty-seven. He and his wife, Fanny, had continued the family tradition by having nine children between 1812 and 1828, but, when John died, Thomas took the children to live with him at his house, Marlborough Cottage (see Fig. 5.1), in Green Lanes, Stoke Newington, where three of them, remaining spinsters, lived after Thomas’s death until their own in 1895 (Fanny), 1902 (Maria), and 1909 (Harriet). A fourth child, John Junior, was a noted sculptor who exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. He was a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelites, and helped finance their magazine, The Germ. Another of Thomas’s brothers, Charles (1800–1877), was a not inconsiderable artist whose works could be seen at the Royal Academy and to whom, incidentally, we must be grateful for his sketches of his siblings and mother. Although this book is concerned with natural rubber, it is worth mentioning that in 1843 Charles was to be introduced to gutta-percha, a material with the

The Battles of the Giants—Thomas Hancock

47

Fig. 5.1 Marlborough Cottage.

same chemical composition as rubber but with a different spatial configuration, by its discoverers, Drs Almeida and Montgomerie. Within a year he had taken out the first of a number of patents concerning its processing and use, including one for coating wire with it to form an electrically-insulated conductor. He founded The West Ham Gutta Percha Company with Henry Bewley and was soon selling a wide range of products, as well as sheet for others to fabricate articles from. By 1855 his catalogue listed over one hundred different products. The two separated and in 1860 Charles Hancock joined S. W. Silver & Company, bringing with him his patents and knowledge of gutta-percha, and entered the business of manufacturing and laying submarine cables through a new company—The India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company, Ltd. Their first cable was in 1865 and ran from Dover to Cap Gris Nez. This was followed in 1867 by a cable for the International Ocean Telegraph Company which linked

Tears of the Tree 48 Havana, Cuba to Key West and Key West to Punta Rassa. For almost fifty years they continued to lay cables across most of the oceans and seas of the world. With the loss of their last ship in 1915, the company withdrew from cable-laying and in the mid1920s became the Silvertown Rubber Company and, eventually, part of BTR Industries Ltd. By 1998 this company had become part of Dunlop Standard Aerospace Group. James, the eldest of the brothers, (1783–1859) married Elizabeth Lyne in 1811 and she gave birth to James Lyne Hancock in 1815. It was he to whom Thomas handed over his thriving company in 1842 and who ran it until his death in 1884 when it passed to Thomas’s grand-nephew, the son of Sarah (one of John and Fanny Hancock’s children) and John Nunn, John Hancock Nunn, who was then aged only twenty-nine. Thomas’s interest in rubber seems to have sprung from a desire to make waterproof fabrics to protect the passengers on his coaches, and he recalled that by 1819 he was beginning to experiment by making solutions of rubber in oil of turpentine, but was dissatisfied with the thin solutions which were all he could obtain and the poor quality of the films cast from them. It later appeared that the oil of turpentine was often impure and this led to the variability in solution properties. At about the same time he hit upon his first reasonably practical use of rubber. He was aware of its unfortunate habit of becoming sticky when hot and brittle when cold, but reasoned that the English climate was not too variable and if the rubber was to be worn close to the skin this should have a compensatory effect. His idea was to attach rubber strips (caoutchouc springs) to articles such as gloves or ‘any article of dress where elasticity is desirable at any particular part’, and this was the subject of his first patent dated 29 April 1820. In the patent he lets his imagination run riot as to the possible applications, clearly foreshadowing the vast range of


49 applications he was to come up with in later life for this new material—rubber. Hancock does not say what source of rubber he initially used to make his elastic springs, but does say that they were sliced and sewn in place on the article to be elasticated. This taught him a new lesson which was that, although a piece of rubber could be stretched, if it was punctured with, say, a needle then it would quickly tear from that point and be useless. His initial answer to this problem was to cut the rubber thicker at the points of attachment and so spread the load around the holes, but he soon came up with a better solution when he realised that a good quantity of rubber was coming into the country in the form of thin-skinned rubber bottles. Here was the ideal material for him. Rings could be cut directly from the bottles, with different-sized bottles, or even different regions of the same bottles, providing the variety of sizes he needed for his multitude of applications. These could be enclosed within a rolled-over piece of the fabric without the need for actually sewing through the rubber itself, a practice which remains in use to this day. His second lesson in rubber engineering followed quickly and shows his abilities as an experimentalist. Many articles were being returned with the elastic springs broken, so he subjected a range of them to a cycle of stretching and relaxation under close observation. He saw ragged edges where the cutting had ‘nicked’ the rubber and that tearing propagated from these defective regions. He further noted that some of the bands did not tear under these conditions and realised that these were the ones which had been immersed in hot water after cutting, the heat allowing any fresh cuts to self-seal. This practice became the norm during his subsequent manufacture of the rings. His ability to observe and experiment would serve him well in the months to come as his new concern was that he was now

Tears of the Tree 50 generating a great deal of waste rubber from this process. The observation that freshly-cut faces of rubber blocks could be fused by simple pressure and a little heat led him to design a mould into which he could place freshly-cut blocks of rubber and compress them to provide a ‘standard block’ of rubber. This was a much more useful starting material for his ideas than the randomly shaped lumps or bottles then being imported. Although this observation had originally been made by François Fresneau and was common practice in the making of catheters in the eighteenth century, it seems probable that Hancock had come across it independently as the timescale between his becoming interested in rubber and observing this phenomenon was extremely short. However, he agreed with the earlier workers that this was a time-consuming process and not always successful, so he set his mind to designing a machine which would tear up any rubber placed in it into fine shreds which would then reunite to give him one homogeneous piece. Still in 1820, he built his first machine out of wood. It simply consisted of a hollow circular cylinder lined with iron spikes inside which was rotated (by hand) a smaller cylinder, again studded with iron spikes (see Fig. 5.2). The rubber shards were dropped into the gap between the cylinders through a ‘door’ in the top of the machine and the handle was turned. On opening the machine Hancock found that he had managed to fuse the shards into one lump of warm rubber, although this still showed graining from the separate pieces. He replaced it in the machine and continued mixing until he had determined how long it took to obtain a uniform ball or ‘slug’ of rubber. He was familiar with fibre-carding machines at that time from his interest in artificial leather, and it seems likely that his design of the pickle was influenced by these. This ‘one-man-powered’ machine would only take a charge of about two ounces of rubber, which was not particularly practical,


51

Fig. 5.2 Hancock’s pickle.

so he immediately designed a larger one, this time made of cast iron, with suitable gearing so that one man could treat about one pound of rubber at a time (see Fig. 5.3). The patent claimed that: . . . in the course of half-an-hour, more or less, according to the speed of the shaft and the quantity of India rubber employed, the combined action of heat and friction, occasioned by the motion and pressure on the India rubber had the effect of uniting it into one compact mass or roll (F).

This is the masticator which he began using in 1821 but which was only described and illustrated in his 1837 patent entitled ‘Dough waterproofing’, to which we shall return later.

52

Tears of the Tree

Fig. 5.3 Hancock’s first metal pickle.

Rubber technology had arrived in the shape of the highly secret ‘pickling machine’, or masticator as we know it today. He soon advanced this to a horse-powered machine (fifteen pounds), and by 1840 his masticator could handle charges up to two hundred pounds. It should be noted that he chose not to patent his ‘pickle’, this being the one time that he preferred to rely on secrecy— an important point which will be returned to later. Both his earliest wooden prototype and his first cast-iron machine remain in existence today, the former in the Science Museum of London and the latter in the care of the Plastics Historical Society.


53 As soon as Hancock had prepared his ‘pickled’ rubber he began experimenting further with rubber solutions, and in 1824 and 1825 he took out three more patents, processes for making artificial leather and for waterproofing ropes and cordage. Interestingly, the first and third of these three patents required the use of latex, which was extremely rare in Europe, as the waterproofing adhesive, although he does not use the word ‘latex’ but talks of this ‘juice’ being identical, when dried, to caoutchouc or India rubber. His choice of solvent for the middle patent, a mixture of highly rectified coal-tar oil and oil of turpentine, was probably influenced by Charles Macintosh’s patent of 1823. In the same year he began collaborating with Macintosh on the manufacture of his ‘double-textured’ material. (It has to be observed somewhere that, whilst Macintosh’s name has no ‘k’ in it, his eponymous article of clothing has!) Macintosh (see Fig. 5.4) was a Glaswegian chemist who had a dyestuffs and mordant business. In 1819 he entered into a contract with the Glasgow Gas Works to relieve it of its waste coal tar, which resulted from the company’s gas manufacturing process. Macintosh wanted the coal tar for its ammonia, but was probably familiar with Syme’s work and realised that he could obtain coal tar naphtha from his waste material. He dissolved rubber in this and came up with the brilliant idea of making a three-ply material, comprising two layers of fabric bonded together with a middle layer of rubber. This was the process he patented in 1823, not the use of naphtha as a solvent, although the patent was the first to refer to this particular chemical. His new industry for producing double-texture waterproof fabrics was founded in Glasgow in 1824. In 1825 Hancock obtained a licence from Macintosh to use his patent, but realised that his own rubber solution, prepared from masticated rubber and a solvent mixture of rectified coal-tar

54

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Fig. 5.4 Charles Macintosh.

naphtha and oil of turpentine, was much superior to that of Macintosh—it was thicker and therefore required less solvent, it penetrated into the fabric less, and it dried to give a less malodorous material. At this stage Macintosh did not trust Hancock sufficiently to use his rubber solutions. However, by 1830 it was obvious to all that Hancock’s solution was significantly superior to that of Macintosh, and so full cooperation between the two began, one feature of which was the construction of an automated


55 spreading machine, probably designed by Walter Hancock, to replace Macintosh’s paintbrushes. At this time Hancock was working with Macintosh, but with a contractual relationship limited to Hancock supplying the rubber solution whilst he carried on his own independent business in Goswell Road, London (see Fig. 5.5). One aspect of his independence was that he was invited to set up a complete manufacturing facility in Paris for Messrs Rattier and Guibal, what today we would call a ‘turn-key’ operation. He supplied the equipment and workers, including a manager, Mr Edward Woodcock, who must have found the life there most convivial because he remained there until at least 1857, when he received a copy of Hancock’s Narrative and wrote a very appreciative reply. It is of interest to note how many of Hancock’s employees stayed with him for many years. Edward had a brother,

Fig. 5.5 The Hancock factory, Goswell Road, 1850.

Tears of the Tree 56 Alonso, who was also working with Hancock at the time that Edward went to Paris and he could be found in 1858 as works manager of Chas. Macintosh and Co. in Manchester. Initially, Hancock kept his mastication process confidential but contracted to supply his solution. Production started in late 1828 and the goods were sold through a shop specially opened by Rattier and Guibal. Hancock also had a share in his brother John’s medical goods and hose manufacturing company, but John sold his share in the company to Chas. Macintosh and Co. in 1833 when he was forced to move to Cornwall because of ill health. In 1834 Hancock’s London factory burnt down, so it was agreed that he would do likewise with his share in John’s company in return for a formal partnership in Chas. Macintosh and Co. Ltd. Almost as soon as Macintosh had started in business in 1824 he had received some large government contracts, so he needed both more space and a reliable source of fabrics. He therefore entered into an agreement with Hugh Hornby Birley and his brother, Joseph, who were cotton spinners based in Manchester, whereby they would build a new factory to make the waterproof material. This gave him the base on which he could now build by closing the Glasgow factory and moving all of his rubber business to Manchester. The factory he actually moved into had been substantially designed and equipped by Hancock in around 1830, and it is interesting to note that Macintosh investigated the possibilities of solvent recovery from the drying cylinders but decided that it was neither commercially viable nor a particularly useful exercise. The new company had as its directors Macintosh, Hancock, the Birley brothers, and William Brockedon. We shall meet Mr Brockedon again but can note here that he had started life as a watchmaker, turned to art, and then became an inventor who, as well as being involved with natural rubber, also invented a process for compressing graphite for ‘lead’ pencils.


57 Hancock, however, remained in London, rebuilt his London base, and continued to manufacture airproof and waterproof cloths and products there, whilst the mastication and preparation of the rubber solutions was carried out in Manchester. The Manchester factory was equipped with steam power to drive the ever larger and more numerous machines, but the first steam engine ever to be used in the rubber industry was installed in Hancock’s Goswell Road, London, factory in 1836. Here it remained in use until 1922. It was known as the ‘Grasshopper’ (see Fig. 5.6). Just as things were settling down it was Hancock’s and Macintosh’s turn to go to law. The first of their major UK cases took place in 1836, with Chas. Macintosh & Co. as plaintiffs and

Fig. 5.6 The ‘Grasshopper’, built by Easton & Amos, 1822.

Tears of the Tree 58 Wynne Ellis as defendant. The plaintiffs’ case was that Everington and Ellis had infringed Charles Macintosh’s patent of 1823 for the manufacture of ‘double-textured’ cloth. In 1824 Macintosh had approached Wynne Ellis, perhaps the richest silk merchant in the UK and an art collector of international renown whose collection later was to form part of the UK National Gallery, for financial backing for his new material. Some of Wynne Ellis’s silks had been treated at Macintosh’s factory in Glasgow, but he was not sufficiently impressed to help finance Macintosh’s expansion plans. However, in 1835, Everington and Ellis began to market ‘Fanshawe’s improved India rubber cloth’, which appeared in all respects identical to that manufactured by Hancock and Macintosh. The latter were just starting to make money and were not prepared to share it with interlopers! The situation was further complicated in that, whilst they were preparing their court case, they applied for an extension of the 1823 patent. The application was heard in December 1835 and it was ruled that a decision should be held over until 1837—after the pending court case. The case for Wynne Ellis was threefold in that evidence was produced that ‘double-textured’ garments had been produced in Demerara since the end of the eighteenth century using latex as the adhesive, that Charles Green had used rubber solution and the double-texture procedure to manufacture balloons, and that it was obvious by inspection of the current output from the Macintosh factory that it bore little resemblance to that produced in 1823, and therefore the process must be different and the patent could not apply. The first point was quickly dealt with (surprisingly) when it was agreed that what happened when using latex was not the same as when using a rubber solution. It was surprising because the plaintiffs had emphasised that the solution was not important but that the patent referred uniquely to the ‘double texture’ in


59 combination with a solution. The second witness was quickly disposed of when it was shown that his ‘double texture’ was an overlapping of seams and that the rubber solution was just a mastic. This left the final point, which put Hancock and Macintosh in a difficult position since the whole manufacturing operation had been the subject of ongoing development and had been carried out in secrecy without the benefit of patent protection. Their first witness was an operative who had left the business in 1825 before Macintosh had moved from Glasgow to Manchester, and he knew only the original procedure so could give away no secrets; but they then had to produce the man who was currently in charge of the manufacturing operations and who knew the development of the spreading machinery. Because of Hancock’s passion for secrecy, however, he knew nothing of the composition of the solution, nor did he have any knowledge of the masticator. They got away with it and were victorious, but opposition to an extension of the patent was so great that they decided to withdraw it and, at last, opted for the only protection left—to patent both the masticator and the spreading machinery. Reading the patent today and knowing of the introduction of the masticator, and Macintosh’s initial (patented) preference for purified coal-tar naptha but subsequent change to Hancock’s thick viscous solutions prepared with naptha and turpentine mixed solvent, etc., one must doubt whether the same verdict would have been reached today. Macintosh was lucky to allow for the spreader by saying in the patent ‘ . . . with a brush or other suitable instrument lay upon the surface of each (fabric) a uniform layer . . . ’. But when it comes to the adhesive the patent appears to be very specific: . . . cemented together by means of a flexible cement . . . prepare the caoutchouc by cutting into thin shreds or parings and then steep it in the substance used in making coal gas, commonly called coal

60

Tears of the Tree oil . . . 10–12 oz to 1 gallon of oil . . . to give a thin pulpy mass . . . pass through a fine wire or silk sieve . . . resembles thin transparent honey . . .

It was only in 1837 that Hancock finally patented both his masticator and spreader in the same UK patent, which was his eighth in seventeen years. The title of the patent:‘ ‘‘Dough Waterproofing’’ and the ‘‘Specification of the Patent’’. . . for an improvement or improvements in the process of rendering cloth and other fabrics partially or entirely impervious to air and water by means of caoutchouc or India rubber’, would suggest that he hoped that its contents would pass unnoticed, although this subterfuge was highlighted by Moulton in a later patent case, as we shall see. The masticator included in this patent shows his earliest iron version, with the functional part as illustrated earlier in this chapter (Fig. 5.3). In 1838 another fire destroyed the Manchester factory, but a new one was quickly built and business continued as before although Macintosh’s 1823 patent had expired in 1837. A few years of profitable manufacture brings us to 1842, and it was in that year that Macintosh and Co. decided to withdraw their operations from London and agreed to sell what had been John Hancock’s hose and tube business to Thomas’s nephew, James Lyne Hancock. Thomas included his interest in the Goswell Road business in the deal and James ran it until his death in 1884. The complicated relationships between various Hancock and Macintosh businesses—part independent and part interdependent—inevitably gave rise to friction. No better example of this exists than the argument between James and Macintosh and Co. as to whether hose pipes and tubes were both covered in the sale agreement of 1842. Macintosh and Co. carried out the vulcanisation of all James’s products (which must have been an extremely inefficient process, the one being in London


61

Fig. 5.7 The Chas. Macintosh & Co. shop in Charing Cross, 1840.

and the other in Manchester), and so knew exactly what he was making. An argument blew up late in 1849 with Macintosh and Co. refusing to vulcanise ‘solid rubber tube’ on the grounds that this was not hose pipe and thus not included in James’s manufacturing rights. Thomas was caught in the middle and came down firmly on his nephew’s side, eventually, on 22 April 1850, writing a two thousand word letter to Macintosh and Co. setting out with wit and irony the history and usage of the words ‘hose’, ‘pipe’, and ‘tube’ during more than three hundred years of English literature. Unfortunately, this is the last letter in the set of a dozen on this topic so, regretfully, the company’s reply is not available.

Tears of the Tree 62 Nevertheless, we must assume the Hancocks won as James’ company went from strength to strength, and on his death it was willed to Thomas’s grand-nephew, John Hancock Nunn. This brings us to what was to be the start of the most contentious period of Hancock’s life—the discovery and subsequent story of vulcanisation in the UK. The story begins in 1842. It is an established fact that Stephen Moulton brought samples of Goodyear’s vulcanised rubber to the UK as Goodyear’s agent, attempting to sell the unpatented process for a considerable sum of money. He had with him a few scraps of vulcanised material, but Hancock comments that when he saw them they were charred at the edges, so it seems obvious that Goodyear was not able to send (or even possibly make) top-quality samples to promote his process. Moulton took them to Chas. Macintosh and Co. in Manchester where there was little interest in investing serious money without a thorough knowledge of the process involved in making it. This was not just for chemical reasons, but also because they needed to understand the technology involved so that they could calculate any capital expenditure which might be necessary to implement the process. William Brockedon (see Fig. 5.8), a director of the company, then showed some of the material to Hancock who was in London. Hancock willingly admitted that he realised that the material contained sulphur and claimed that he had been experimenting with sulphur for many years himself but with no success. The fact that it was somehow possible to obtain the result he was after with this substance spurred him on to concentrate on it further. In his 1857 Narrative he describes how he carried out numerous experiments in his private laboratory at his home, Marlborough Cottage, through the winter of 1842/43 and into the summer of 1843 when he had to purchase ice to see if he had changed the properties of his strips when cold. He realised that


63

Fig. 5.8 William Brockedon.

sometimes he had managed to effect what he called ‘the change’ he was looking for, but he was not yet sure of the ‘hows and whys’—very like Goodyear. However, he took advantage of the English patent laws which allowed an inventor to apply for a preliminary patent to protect his interests after his first discoveries, and then six months to clarify points of detail before the patent became final, or enrolled. It was during this time that his friend and colleague, Charles Macintosh, died. During those six months Hancock carried out what were possibly the first systematic design experiments in the field of chemistry. He began by immersing rubber strips in molten

Tears of the Tree 64 sulphur and removing them after varying periods of time. Here he observed the previously unknown dissolution and steady migration of the yellow sulphur through the rubber section until the colour was uniform throughout. Nothing had happened to the physical properties, however, so he than began raising the temperature, again studying the samples periodically, and eventually removed one sliver to find that it had undergone the change he was looking for. He further noted that slivers which remained even longer in the sulphur had turned ‘black and horny, thus at once and indubitably opening to me the true source and process of producing the ‘‘change’’ in all its states and conditions, and in its pure and pristine simplicity’. He immediately appreciated that his existing equipment would enable him to process sulphur-treated rubber either dry or in solution before vulcanisation. With the information he had gathered, such as ways of adding sulphur and the time– temperature relationship of curing or vulcanising, he was able to get his final patent enrolled on 21 May 1844. It is a remarkable and all-embracing document describing various ways of adding sulphur—in the dry using his masticator or a mill in the same way that he was adding inorganic powders, or by immersing the masticated rubber in molten sulphur—together with subsequent spreading and moulding options as well as time: temperature:thickness correlation data for optimum curing or vulcanising. Ways of removing excess sulphur after vulcanisation are also discussed. Whilst Goodyear may well have been the first person to vulcanise rubber, he certainly had no control of his process at the time of Hancock’s patent, when the latter was able to illustrate his complete understanding and control of the chemistry. It was at this time, when his small-scale experiments moved from his private laboratory to the factory at Manchester, that


65 William Brockedon came up with the name for the process— ‘vulcanisation’. The truth about Hancock and his ‘discovery’ of vulcanisation is unlikely ever to become clearer, although, given his Christian upbringing and reputation for honesty and fairness amongst his workers, there is no reason to doubt his version of events. Let his employees have their say. When he retired in 1858 he was presented with an illuminated address, written by a committee of employees, the grammar of which an unknown director would later apologise for to Hancock. The first two paragraphs read: WE, the operatives in the employ of Chas Macintosh and Co., cannot permit the opportunity to pass of your retirement as partner in the above firm, without expressing our heartfelt gratitude for the kindness, generosity and benevolence which you have so liberally bestowed upon us while in your employ. THERE are many of us who have for a long series of years witnessed your Christian forbearance, mildness of council and impartiality which have assumed more the character of an indulgent parent than an employer.

Some, who had been unable to append their signatures to the original address for various reasons, later wrote asking that their names should be associated with the sentiments expressed therein. It should also be noted that a number of chemists swore that, even if he had analysed Goodyear’s vulcanised material, this would not have given him enough information to manufacture it. Moulton, however, claimed that some of Hancock’s employees did carry out the analyses and one Mr Cooper had sworn that he was one who did. Alexander Parkes, the inventor of the ‘cold-cure’ process, went one step further and claimed that both Hancock and Brockedon had admitted to him that their

Tears of the Tree 66 experiments on the Goodyear vulcanisates had enabled them to understand what he had done, although how this statement differs from Hancock’s—that he realised sulphur was present and pursued the matter until he had obtained his ‘cure’—would appear to be one for the pedants. Whatever the truth, the fact remains that Hancock beat Goodyear to the Patent Office by some eight weeks and did nothing illegal or underhand. His understanding of the ‘cure’ or vulcanisation process and his ability to control it was certainly much more advanced than Goodyear’s. There also exists one report that Goodyear visited Hancock at Marlborough Cottage in 1843 and was entertained there on later visits. It claims that they were said to be firm friends, a relationship which would be difficult to understand if Goodyear had believed that Hancock had acted unethically. In November 1845 there was a rearrangement of partners at Chas. Macintosh and Co. George Macintosh, Charles’s son, and Henry Birley retired, and the remaining directors were identified in the ‘Notice of Dissolution of Partnership’ as Thomas Hancock, Richard, Thomas H., and Herbert Birley, and William Brockedon. Soon after, in 1846, the company purchased from Alexander Parkes his patent for the vulcanising of single-texture fabrics by a ‘cold’ process using sulphur chloride in carbon disulphide solution for £5000, and this added the final string to the company’s vulcanising empire. The company flourished and it is hard to find an article today which is made of vulcanised rubber and which does not feature in Hancock’s Narrative. The one notable exception is the pneumatic tyre which, although normally associated with John Boyd Dunlop’s invention of 1888, was first invented by R. W. Thompson in 1845. As well as describing hard rubber (vulcanite or ebonite), Hancock also mentioned blown sponge, although the latter never achieved significance during his lifetime.


67

Fig. 5.9 The Chas. Macintosh & Co. trademark—HAN (d) COCK.

There were, however, still legal battles to be fought. In 1847 the first major shipment of vulcanised rubber products, mainly rubber overshoes, arrived in the UK from the States. This had the potential to undermine the position of Chas. Macintosh & Co. and had to be contested on the strength of Hancock’s prior patent. This was found to be valid and Macintosh & Co. granted The

Tears of the Tree 68 Hayward Rubber Company of Connecticut sole rights to import and sell vulcanised rubber footwear in the UK (for a consideration). In 1849 Chas. Macintosh & Co. began to prepare a case against a UK importer who was bypassing Hayward and, yet again, Hancock’s patent was found to stand. With these decisions in his favour, Hancock felt able to challenge the biggest thorn in his side—Stephen Moulton—who was manufacturing vulcanised rubber goods from his factory in Bradford-on-Avon. Stephen Moulton (1794–1880, see Fig. 5.10) is ‘the forgotten man’ of the UK rubber industry who seems only to be remembered as the man who brought samples of Goodyear’s vulcanised rubber to England and who passed some of them, via Brockedon, to Hancock. In fact, he became a major UK competitor to Hancock and was also responsible for opening up the south-west of England to the infant rubber industry. Moulton was born in County Durham in 1794 but his family was not North Country; indeed, his parents were both Londoners, where his father ran a law stationary business.

Fig. 5.10 Stephen Moulton.


69 Mrs Moulton was visiting her sister when Stephen arrived! Like Hancock, his early life is undocumented, but in December 1826 the records of St George’s Church, Hanover Square, show that he married Elizabeth Hales of Somerset. The union produced nine children. Unusually, all of these survived to adulthood. We next hear of him in 1839, in America, living in New York and described as ‘a broker’. It was here that he met Goodyear, Hayward, and the Rider brothers, who were rubber manufacturers. It was through these relationships that Goodyear asked him to return to England and attempt to persuade some members of the British rubber industry to put up capital to develop his improved rubber products. Having failed in this project, Moulton returned to the US but remained bitten by the rubber bug, so much so that in 1847 he returned to England, determined to set up his own rubber goods factory. He had no desire to pay either Hancock or Goodyear royalties for the use of their patents, so he entered into an agreement with the Rider brothers and a chemist called James Thomas. This agreement allowed him to use the US rubber factory of the Rider brothers for development work, whilst James Thomas would allow him to patent in the UK his vulcanisation process using lead hyposulphite instead of elemental sulphur. They would have a share in Moulton’s profits from the patent. Unfortunately, the patent seemed to be based more on hope than proven results and it took two years of experimentation before Moulton succeeded in developing it to a practical conclusion. Although it had originally been agreed that the patent would be funded by the Rider brothers and that this would be repaid from future profits from the products manufactured in England, the Riders suffered from a downturn in the US economy and refused to financially back Moulton further, causing him, in late 1848, to go into the manufacturing business on his own.

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The location he chose was unusual in that it was in the west of England, far removed from the more usual centres of industrial activity, and was a disused woollen mill, the Kingston Mill, in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. Nevertheless, it had a wealth of advantages: coal from Somerset, the river Avon alongside the mill to supply power and washing water, the closely adjacent Kennet and Avon Canal, and the Great West Road to provide access to London. It was cheap and contained within the eight acre site ‘Kingston House’, which would provide the family home. Now that he had committed himself, the Riders were willing to offer him non-financial help, and so provided both advice and lent him the engineer who had built their machinery so that he could oversee the fitting out of Moulton’s factory. It thus became one of the first factories in the UK to be conceived and equipped as one complete unit. At that time it was not possible to buy much of the equipment needed, so some was built on site and some was manufactured by iron foundries to Moulton’s design. By 1850 Moulton and the Riders had a joint manufacturing agreement in place, but Hancock was not prepared to stand by and see his monopoly disappear without a fight, so it was back to the courts. He was, however, busy with the company’s large display stands at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where, as has already been said, he was in competition with Goodyear. An indication of the display presented by Chas. Macintosh and Co. can be obtained from Hancock’s Narrative: The year 1851 brought with it the memorable Crystal Palace and the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of the Industry of all Nations’, and we were not slow in availing ourselves of this opportunity of exhibiting such a general collection of rubber manufactures as the world had never before seen; comprising specimens of almost every article to which the substance had been applied. Whether adhesive or unadhesive, vulcanised or unvulcanised, possessing


71

elongating elasticity, or rendered rigid by hard vulcanising. Plain, coloured, printed, embossed, moulded portraits [see Fig. 5.11]. Medallions [see Fig. 5.13a], tablets, stick and umbrella handles, mechanical applications, toys and various other things made entirely of rubber, and ordinary and coloured solutions were also there, to which must be added some beautiful specimens of rubber produced by the converting process of Mr. Alexander Parkes. Of course we had also all the well-known Macintosh articles, Such as cloaks, capes, of double and single textures, airbeds, pillows, cushions, life-preservers, model pontoons, diving dresses, gas-bags, &c., &c.

This activity meant that Hancock could not take Moulton to court until after the exhibition. Here Moulton claimed that his patent of 1847 in which he used ‘lead hydrosulphite and artificial sulphured of lead’ did not infringe Hancock’s patent which just used sulphur, or Goodyear’s which used lead oxide and

Fig. 5.11 Rubber moulding of a pastoral scene which may have been shown on the Hancock stand at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Tears of the Tree 72 sulphur. He also mixed ‘in the dry’, whereas Hancock’s patent was solely concerned with applications of solutions of rubber (not true), and there were other differences of varying importance which had allowed the patent to be granted. He further raised the point that Hancock’s patent was, in any event, invalid because its deposit paper of 1843 was not followed through in the final specification. As we have already seen, the title was: . . . For improvements in the preparation or manufacture of caoutchouc in combination with other substances, which preparation or manufacture is suitable for rendering leather cloth and other fabrics waterproof, and to various other purposes for which caoutchouc is employed.

The text begins with: . . . Preparation or manufacture of caoutchouc in combination with other substances, consists in diminishing or obviating their clammy adhesiveness and also in diminishing or entirely preventing their tendency to stiffen and harden by cold and become soften or decomposed by heat, grease and oil.

The eventual decision of the Vice-Chancellor’s court was unusual. The judge found for Hancock on all counts but pointed out that, because he had taken so long to bring Moulton to court (1847– 1852), he felt unable to make an injunction against Moulton, but ordered the motion to ‘stand over’ so that the plaintiffs could take further action if they so wished. Whether by coincidence or planning, it was shortly after this that Hancock had published by James Barclay of London a book which contained reprints of all the fourteen patents which he had taken out between 1820 and 1847. The book was comprehensively indexed and would suggest that he was setting out his position: This is where I stand. Certainly you can use my process to manufacture any of


73 these (or related) products. Just remember to ask first and pay for a licence. Moulton was extremely unhappy with this outcome, not least because he continued to harbour a dislike of Hancock, believing him to have stolen Goodyear’s ideas and failing conspicuously to give him credit for the original discovery of sulphur vulcanisation. However, he now was able to manufacture a wide range of goods and he specialised in industrial and engineering applications, although his records show that he continued to produce rubberised fabrics, beds, and cushions through to 1880. The major products of the company were railway and carriage springs which, together with other railway-related products, grew from 30% of output by value in 1860 to 85% by 1890. The growth was due, in considerable measure, to Moulton’s patented (1861) suspension unit, which consisted of a coiled spring embedded in a block of rubber. Other areas of importance were hoses, sealing washers, and valves. Perhaps surprisingly, the company never showed much interest in rubber tyres, although the pneumatic tyre was not patented by Dunlop until eight years after Stephen Moulton’s death, whilst the other potential growth area, footwear, was bedevilled by patent restrictions. The company flirted with rubberised conveyer belting in its early days, but dropped out of this market due to the intense competition and low profitability by the time of Moulton’s death. In 1891 the company amalgamated with George Spencer of London to become Spencer Moulton. This company continued until 1956 when it became part of the Avon Rubber Company. Production ceased on the site in 1993. There is a footnote to the story of Stephen Moulton; his great-grandson is Dr Alex Moulton (born 1926), who is also famous for his involvement with rubber in engineering. Not only did he develop the Moulton bicycle with its rubber suspension, but also

Tears of the Tree 74 the rubber suspension used in the Mini, which further developed into the hydroelastic system used initially in the 1100/1300 Austin/Morris series, then in the Rover 100 series, and currently in the MGF sports car. Let us now return to the trials of Thomas Hancock and Chas. Macintosh and Co. The American shoe trade was not at all happy with Hancock’s victories and the indecisive verdict in the case of Hancock versus Moulton so a Mr Ross, who was importing American shoes into the UK but not via Hayward, challenged Macintosh & Co. to sue—which Hancock duly did. After all the old ground had been gone over again the jury failed to reach a verdict, but the fighting spirit of the anti-Hancock group was high and they issued a writ of scire facias against Hancock, essentially putting the onus on him to provide evidence that he had actually carried out all the work described in his patent. The trial returned to court in mid-1855 and even Goodyear attended to stake his claim to royalties from Hancock should the latter lose. In the end it came down to one question. When Hancock had taken out his patent in 1843 had he understood and achieved vulcanisation? If he had only done this between 1843 and the final specification in 1844 then his patent would fall. In January 1856 the saga came to an end with the jury finding for Hancock, and Moulton was granted a licence to manufacture rubber products, excluding clothing and medical goods, for the sum of £600 per annum. Hancock was able to get on with his stand at the International Exhibition of 1855 in Paris. Somewhere in all this activity, Hancock found the time to write his magnum opus, The origin and progress of the CAOUTCHOUC or India-rubber manufacture in England, which was published in 1857 and sets out in great detail his business-related life from 1820. It includes many illustrations of his products as well as page upon


75

Fig. 5.12 The Chas. Macintosh and Co. factory in Manchester as it was in 1857.

page of listed products with their descriptions and uses for the benefit of the uninitiated. The patent specifications are also appended. A particularly interesting section tabulates the exports of rubber from Para´ to cities throughout the world from 1837 to 1856, as well as total rubber imports to, and exports from, the UK during the period 1842–1855. To quote just one statistic, the total imports of rubber into the UK in 1842 were around 140 tons, but had risen to 2235 tons by 1855. These figures accounted for about half the output of Amazonia. Some of that was traded on. In 1842 about 10% left the country as the raw material and this had risen to over 18% by 1855. Nevertheless, the growth of rubber product manufacturing in the UK over this period was phenomenal—and we still did not have the motor car with its demand for tyres! James Lyne Hancock authorised a reprint of the Narrative, without the patent appendix, in 1920 to celebrate one hundred years of the company’s existence. Hancock sent copies of his book to many of his friends and business colleagues but there is no record of one going to Charles

Tears of the Tree 76 Goodyear. However, one was sent to Nathaniel Hayward with an attached letter which is reproduced in full below. Stoke Newington. N. 27th. Jan Y. 1857. Nathaniel Hayward. Esq., Dear Sir. Considering the position you are entitled to take amongst the foremost in the manufacture of India Rubber in the United States I have thought that having written a simple narrative of the part which I have taken in its manipulations in this country a copy would not prove unacceptable to you. I have therefore forwarded one to your address of which 1 beg your acceptance. If you have not already done the same thing in America no man I should think is more able or more entitled to fulfil such a task. I indulge the hope that although fast declining into the vale of years I may yet live to see such a production emanating from the press under your hand. With the expression of every good wish to you as a Fellow labourer in the same pursuit, I am, Dear Sir,

One wonders why Hancock chose to write to Hayward in this way. He could not have read Goodyear’s book, only a very few were published, but he might well have heard comments from America that Goodyear felt, at best, put out by Hancock’s patent and subsequent victories in court. Did he think that Hayward could add some revealing background to the very incomplete story of Goodyear’s discovery of vulcanisation? Of equal interest is that he chose to send a copy of the book to Horace Day, writing inter alia: . . . I have written a Narrative of the part I have taken in the Rubber manufacture in England . . . If a similar narrative of an authentic character has been published in the United States I should feel very much obliged if you would be so good as to send a copy to me.


77 (The underlining is Hancock’s.) Did he know of Goodyear’s book and was making some derogatory implication or was he unaware of its existence? He also found time, with considerable prescience, to send a copy of his book to the first Keeper of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Sir W. J. Hooker. Having previously, and to no avail, sent an employee to Para´ to try and persuade the tappers and collectors to improve the quality of their material, he suggested that consideration should be given to creating plantations in either the East or West Indies. Hooker replied, mentioning that he knew Macintosh as they had been in Glasgow at the same time and adding that he had already asked his agent in Brazil to acquire seeds from the best rubber trees for germination at Kew. Unfortunately, he was not successful and a generation was to pass before this was to be finally achieved. This is a generation gap which, if it had not occurred, could have substantially altered history, as we shall see. This is not quite the end of Hancock’s story because someone discovered that there were two patents by Goodyear and Hancock covering the UK. In England Hancock’s preceded that of Goodyear by some two months, but in Scotland the position was reversed with Goodyear’s application dated three months ahead of that of Hancock and the final specification being just one month ahead. In 1856 the North British Rubber Company was founded in Edinburgh, being shipped over, lock, stock, barrel and key workers, from the US. Legal opinion was that Hancock’s delay in filing his Scottish patent would probably lead to defeat if he went to court and, since it had so little time left to run, the battles at last ceased. Hancock’s very abridged reports of his trials in his Narrative paint him very much as the injured party just trying to protect his interests, whilst the rest of the rubber world is bent on destroying him and the monopoly he aimed to obtain in the UK. How

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78 (a)

(b)

Fig. 5.13 Thomas Hancock: (a) an ebonite medallion, and (b) a portrait.

The Battles of the Giants—Thomas Hancock (a)

79

(b)

Fig. 5.14 (a) Hancock’s memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery, and (b) the inscription on Hancock’s memorial.

justified he was in holding those beliefs the reader must judge, but what is certain is that without Hancock’s drive and inventions between 1820 and 1850 the UK rubber industry would never have achieved the advancements it did, and the UK would be a worse place for that. Thomas Hancock died at his house in Green Lanes, Stoke Newington, on 26 March 1865 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery (see Fig. 5.14). He left just over sixty thousand pounds, a not inconsiderable sum, but only a fraction of what he might have made if he had been the hard uncaring money-grabber that some have made him out to be. On 7 April 1865 The Mechanics’ Magazine published a thirteen-hundred word obituary. The house survived in the care of his three spinster nieces until the last one died in 1909, after which it had a chequered

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Fig. 5.15 Plaque erected on the site of Marlborough Cottage, 2003.

history until 8 January 1945 when a German V2 rocket exploded in the next door meadow. The house was terminally damaged and soon afterwards demolished. In its place was erected a block of flats, but Hancock’s contribution to the UK rubber industry remains for all to see in the form of a plaque erected on the site by the Plastics Historical Society in 2003 (see Fig. 5.15).

6 Rubber goes East It is probably useful to note at the beginning of this chapter the location of the Hevea or Para´ rubber tree which was, and still is, believed to provide the best rubber. With two very small exceptions, it is confined to the land south of the River Amazon, dropping from its estuary at Bele´m to about 15 south, then swinging west to the border between Peru and Bolivia, before swinging round in a great loop taking in about one-third of Peru, before rejoining the Amazon where Brazil, Peru, and Colombia meet. The two exceptions are a small looped incursion to the north-west of Manaos (today known as Manaus) and a triangular excursion north of the estuary delta 1 or so north of the equator. Between 1851, the year of the ‘Great Exhibition’ in London, and 1855 a Scottish explorer, Richard Spruce, was searching for new plants in the Amazon basin. Thousands were brought to England but he did not bring any Hevea seedlings as he knew that these would not survive the long journey home. He thought of bringing some seeds back but found that these quickly turned rancid after collection, so he abandoned that idea. He did, however, make detailed studies of the tapping and collecting procedures adopted by the natives and noted that the price (demand) was rising rapidly. He also realised that the tappers were essentially slaves, given advances for tools and food which were to be paid off against future earnings. The high prices

Tears of the Tree 82 demanded for the former and low prices paid by the traders to the tappers for their rubber ensured that this would be a very long process. Given the high death rate amongst the tappers due to disease and malnutrition, it was more likely to be ‘never’. It is worth remembering that Thomas Hancock had sent one of his employees to the Amazon basin in an attempt to persuade the dealers to supply cleaner rubber. Obviously, the incentives to the tappers were few and it was not uncommon for pelles or smoked balls of rubber to have a stone inserted in the centre to increase their weight and hence selling price (see Fig. 6.1). At the same time that Spruce was travelling in the Amazon basin, a young naval officer called Clements Markham was devoting two years of his life to journeying around Peru, and here he noted two unrelated things which were to have a significant effect on his career and the future of the industrial world. The first

Fig. 6.1 A smoked ball of rubber (pelle) being cut in half in Para´ to check quality.

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83 was the cinchona tree, from the bark of which is extracted quinine, and he determined to transplant this to India for the treatment of the tropical diseases which were rampant there and which posed a bigger threat to the lives of the British soldiers and families than did actual warfare. The second was the death of the rubber-producing trees due to massive over-tapping when numerous cuts were made simultaneously in the bark of the same tree. When he returned to England he obtained a position in the Civil Service and spent the next few years organising the movement of the cinchona tree to India via the Botanic Gardens at Kew with the help of one of their staff, Robert Cross. For this work Markham was later to be awarded a knighthood. The transplantation required further journeys to Peru and in 1865 he was in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) checking on his trees. Here he found that the lust for rubber was being met by the slaughter tapping of India’s rubber plant—ficus elastica. It was then that he became the first person to realise that ‘wild rubber’ would never be able to meet the ever-increasing demand of the industrialising nations. He wrote to the India Office suggesting that rubber plantations be established to meet this growing demand. No doubt his idea was that this should be a British exploit on Britishcontrolled land and India would meet the bill nicely. Markham’s letter remained on file and on his return he was promoted before going to Abyssinia with the 1867–1869 expedition, after which he returned to spend two years preparing detailed maps from his notes. Time was passing, but in 1870 Markham decided that he must act. When it is considered that every steam vessel afloat, every train and every factory on shore employing steam power, must of necessity use India-rubber, it is hardly possible to overrate the importance of securing a permanent supply, in connection with the industry of the world.

Tears of the Tree 84 He had seen papers published by James Collins, who was then the curator of the museum of the Pharmaceutical Society, on rubber and realised that here was a man with a knowledge base which should be tapped. He therefore commissioned him to write as detailed and as comprehensive a report on all aspects of rubber production as possible, and this was completed in 1872. The report favoured the collection of Hevea seeds and was circulated to several interested parties, one of whom, Dietrich Brandis, supported Collins’s idea and suggested southern India or Ceylon as good locations for possible plantations. Markham was now moving fast and sent his old and trusted previous ‘partner’, Robert Cross, to the Amazon to collect seeds. In 1873, after discussions with Sir Joseph Hooker, Director of the Botanic Gardens at Kew, he requested the Foreign Office to ask the British Consul at Bele´m (also known as Para´, the capital of Para´ State) to send some seeds of the Hevea tree to Kew. He suggested that a certain Mr Wickham at Santarem might carry out the collection as he had previously written to Hooker offering to supply Kew with botanical specimens. In the meantime, the first rubber seeds had turned up in London. In Collins’s second publication he had asked readers to send him any new information which they might have on rubber. Along with that feedback came an offer from Charles Ferris to sell him some two thousand freshly collected seeds. The news was passed to Markham who purchased them on Kew’s behalf, where they were planted. Unfortunately, only twelve germinated and these soon died, although six survived long enough to be the first Hevea ever to arrive in India. They were delivered to the Calcutta Botanic Gardens and the lesson learnt from this was that any more should be sent further south, to warmer climes. Whilst waiting to hear from Wickham, Markham had been offered seeds by a Bolivian, Ricardo Cha´vez. These arrived in

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85 mid-1875 when Markham was away from his office. No one knew what to do with them, and by the time any decision was reached they were useless. This brings us to ‘a certain Mr Wickham’. At about the time that Thomas Hancock was writing to Sir William Hooker, the then Director of the Botanic Gardens at Kew (who was followed in this post by his son, Sir Joseph, in 1865), about the possibility of the UK starting some form of rubber plantation industry, there was the young Henry Alexander Wickham who was a ten-yearold boy with his life before him. He was the eldest child of Henry and Harriette (neé Johnson) Wickham and was to have two siblings, Harriette Jane and John, the latter being born after Henry senior had died in the London cholera epidemic of 1850. The death of Henry senior left the family in dire financial straits as there was no private income, and Mrs Wickham had to work as a milliner to support them. It is perhaps inevitable that Henry was somewhat spoilt and had an unexceptional schooling and early life. He showed some talent for sketching and painting and this was to provide a pictorial insight into his later travels. He was also reportedly good at fishing, which may have given him a grounding in many of the ‘fisherman’s tales’ he would come out with later in life. In 1866, aged twenty, he set out for Central America. Possibly he had been inspired by the stories of Robert Cross concerning his exploits in bringing the cinchona tree from South America in 1860. Wickham arrived in Nicaragua on 22 October and from there he travelled up country to spend nine months catching exotic birds, the feathers of which he sent to London for the ladies’ hat trade—possibly to his mother. By the end of the summer of 1867 he was back in England. A year later saw him in the Orinoco Delta and, again, he travelled up country tapping wild rubber trees, eventually crossing to the River Negro which

Tears of the Tree 86 led him to Manaus, strategically positioned at the River’s confluence with the River Amazon. As the crow flies, Manaus is about eight hundred miles inland, due west from Bele´m (Para´) (see Fig. 8.2). By river it is considerably further! He followed the Amazon to Para´, where he met the British Consul, James Drummond Hay, who had written a report on the socioeconomic climate of the region with particular reference to the profits being made by rubber collecting. Wickham gave a full transcription of the report in his first book, published in 1872, entitled Rough notes on a journey through the wilderness from Trinidad to Para´, Brazil, by way of the great cataracts of the Orinoco, Atababo and the Rio Negro. From Bele´m he shipped to England, noting that: I have come to the conclusion that the valley of the Amazon is the great and best field for any of my countrymen who have energy and a spirit of enterprise as well as a desire for independence.

One has to wonder at his enthusiasm when his notes tell of sandflies, mosquitoes, tropical rainstorms and almost unbearable heat, semi-starvation, and malaria. Nevertheless, he vowed to return to Santarem, located at the confluence of the Tapajos and Amazon rivers, about three hundred and fifty crow miles and five hundred water miles inland, for his next adventure. Back in England he married Violet, daughter of W. H. J. Carter, who was a publisher with a bookshop/library in London and who, it is generally believed, financed much of Wickham’s later travels and (mis)adventures. Soon after the wedding, in the summer of 1871, they set sail for Santarem, accompanied by Wickham’s mother, sister Harriette, and brother John. A sketch by Wickham of their first house survives in the New York Public Library and shows a very primitive wood-framed shack with thatched roof and walls. Harriette and John were both married in Bele´m in July 1873, but by 1876 Mrs Wickham senior,

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87 Harriette, and John’s mother-in-law had all been killed by the Amazonian climate. Wickham had taken with him from England some labourers with the idea of growing sugar, manioc, and tobacco (rubber was not yet in the picture), but they soon deserted him and he was forced to move several times in a search for reliable workers. Eventually, the family returned to Santarem where there was a group of ex-confederate soldiers who worked as a commune, thus avoiding the problems with local labour. All this time Wickham’s lifestyle was progressing smoothly downhill. In late 1874 he had been offered ten pounds for one thousand seeds by Markham but saw no point in putting himself out for such a sum. After much discussion within the India Office, this number was increased to ten thousand, and in April 1875 Wickham received a letter from Markham, through Hooker, offering ten pounds per thousand for as many as he could collect. The contract was supposed to include the words ‘viable seeds’, but ‘viable’ got omitted! Wickham pointed out that it was now at the very end of the seed-drop season so things would have to wait until the next season, nine months away. During the first six months of 1876, Wickham’s ‘extraction’ of some 70 000 rubber seeds from Amazonia and their transportation to Kew, via Liverpool, took place, but the complexities of this story are many and remain unresolved to this day. The story was told many times by Wickham, the first being in his book of 1908, On the plantation, cultivation, and curing of Para´ Indian rubber, with more and more added refinements until his death in 1928. Even the first version runs to seven pages but can be summarised as follows. The Amazonas, under Captain Murray, the first of a new line of Inman Line-owned steamships, had arrived at Santarem and he had received an invitation to dine on board. The ship then continued

Tears of the Tree 88 its voyage upstream to Manaus. He next heard that the ship had been stripped of its cargo and abandoned by two of its crew. Murray was unable to purchase any cargo for the return voyage to the UK, so he (Wickham) chartered it and arranged to meet it at Santarem, where he would load the seeds he had managed to collect. He then immediately set off by canoe up the River Tapajos and, working with as many natives as he could recruit, ranged the forests collecting seeds. The girls in the village made baskets or crates of split cane to receive the seeds, which were lightly dried and packed between layers of banana leaves to preserve their vitality. He also noted that he was working against time as, although the seeds would fall for a further month or so, he had his appointment to keep with Captain Murray and the Amazonas. He returned down the Tapajos, loaded the otherwise empty ship, and returned with his wife to Europe, dropping off at Le Havre to arrange for a train to meet the steamer when it docked in Liverpool and transport the seeds without delay to Kew. Unfortunately, Wickham’s story only states that he arranged to meet the Amazonas at Santarem ‘on a certain date’. We know the seeds arrived at Kew on 14 June 1876 and that the Amazonas docked in Liverpool on 10 June. We also know that he wrote to Hooker on 6 March claiming: I am now collecting Indian rubber seeds in the ciringals (areas of tapped trees) of the River Tapajos being careful to select only those of the best quality.

Unfortunately, the story just does not gel. First, there is the question of the origin of the 70 000 seeds themselves. Given that the Hevea trees were widely scattered throughout the tropical rainforest and not in tidy plantations, and that the seeds do not just drop but are ‘catapulted’ up to forty yards from their parent tree, could Wickham and a few helpers really

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89 have collected 70 000 seeds in a matter of days or had he been hoarding them since the dropping season began in January when he knew that he would get the contract? His wife also noted in her diary that he put out a call for seeds and was buying all he could get hold of (sources obviously unknown). He knew they had a very short ‘shelf life’ but, after all, he was going to make sure he was paid on the basis of ‘number delivered’, not ‘number germinated’. Secondly, there is the question of the ship. The Amazonas was built in 1874 by A. Simey and Co. at Sunderland for the Laing family, and was first registered in 1875. She was almost immediately sailing under the Inman line flag, where she was captained by George Murray, a man in his mid-thirties. During the time of interest to us she had made two voyages to Brazil. She had sailed from Liverpool on 24 December 1875, arrived in Para´ on 19 January 1876, continued to Manaus, and then returned to Para´ on 15 February. She was home in Liverpool on 14 March. She set sail again on 25 March 1876 with many of the same crew and, although there are no records of her times in Brazil, we can assume she arrived in Para´ in mid-April, and was back there close to 10 May since she was certainly home on 10 June. These dates do not fit with Wickham’s letter of 6 March; nor does the conclusion that the Amazonas must have been at Santarem in early May fit with Wickham’s comment that there was still one month or so of seed-drop time left to him, since this period finishes in late April, not June. The detailed crew records exist today and provide an interesting insight into seafaring at that time. The voyage was described in the agreement in considerable detail and, although it would take only a little over three months, the contract allowed up to twelve months. The food ration for each of the crew was listed (but could be varied at the master’s option). No grog was permitted on board and there would be no advances of pay until

Tears of the Tree 90 the voyage was complete. The Amazonas should have had a crew of thirty-two. One, Joseph Ceriney (?), failed to appear at the time of sailing, whilst another, James Coran (?), deserted when the ship docked at Havre four days later. Two more crew members joined at Lisbon: the surgeon, whose name is not legible, and a replacement able seaman, Alexander Lorrimer. The release documents show that the surgeon was signed off when the Amazonas returned to Lisbon on 1 June and all the other members of the crew were discharged with full pay on 10 June. Contrary to that part of Wickham’s story, none was missing and there were no adverse behaviour notes on any crew member. The Liverpool Customs Office bill of entry (see Fig. 6.2) shows the ship fully laden with most of her cargo (including 171 cases of rubber) being loaded at Manaus, well upstream from Santarem, although she did call at Obedos, some seventy-five miles upstream from Santarem, to take on board more cargo, including 819 bags of Para´ nuts. As one might expect, the goods were to be delivered to specified destinations. There was no question of the shipping line trading on its own behalf. Our problem now is that there is no record of the ship stopping at Santarem and there is no mention in the cargo manifest of rubber seeds. It is tempting to think that the ‘Para´ nuts’ could be rubber tree seeds, but we know that these were what we call today ‘Brazil nuts’. Also, there is no reason for Wickham to travel seventy-five miles upstream to Obedos when the ship would be passing his door less than a day later! It is worth calculating what we are looking for and, although all the figures are very much approximations, they do give some idea of the ‘package’. The weight of 70 000 rubber tree seeds is about 700 000 grams or three-quarters of a ton. Allowing for the banana leaf layers and the cases, the gross weight must have been nearer 1500 kg or one and a half tons. For the woven baskets to be

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91

(a)

(b)

Fig. 6.2 Bill of Entry for the SS Amazonas, Liverpool, 12 June 1876: (a) heading, and (b) details.

portable by the natives they would be unlikely to weigh more than 30 kg, so we are looking for a few tens (fifty?) of them. Converting 30 kg of seeds and leaves to volume gives a value of around 65 litres, which is close to a 40 cm cube or a 50 cm diameter hemispherical basket—a very convenient size to manhandle for the relatively small Amazonian natives.

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We must accept from Kew’s records that they were on this ship, but where and how? The problem we have with Wickham’s story is that we do not know the detailed source of all of the seeds he supplied or if, as his wife said, he actually bought some from the natives. If his collecting times were right, then the seeds must have been stored for a considerable period until the Amazonas was in the region of Santarem in early May, and how did he get them on board the ship? No documents have turned up to date which show that the India Office actually paid anything for the ship’s ‘charter’. Certainly, the Brazilians described Wickham’s actions as despicable and branded him a thief for carrying out an ‘exploit hardly defensible in international law’. In 1884 the state of Amazonas levied a massive export duty on rubber seeds, and in 1918 it banned the export completely, but in 1876 there were no restrictions in place. As early as 1861, a Brazilian, Joao Martins da Silva Coutinho, had suggested the formal cultivation of Hevea in plantations, and he repeated this in 1867 when he was the chairman of a jury examining the quality of rubber from sources throughout the world. This was picked up by Collins and included in his report to Sir Clements Markham. Interestingly, and in complete contrast to their attitude to Wickham, Brazil glorifies to this day the names of Francisco Inocentcio de Souza Coutinho, who smuggled seeds of many spices from Cayenne to Para´ in 1797, and Francisco de Melo Palheta, who, in 1727, had been able to charm the wife of the French Governor into providing him with a number of forbidden fruits, including coffee seeds from which Brazil has certainly benefitted considerably. Regardless of the details, Wickham’s seeds did arrive at Kew on 14 June 1876 and were planted in seedbeds the day after their arrival. Within a few weeks 2397 of them had germinated (rather less than the 10% or seven thousand subsequently claimed by

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93 Wickham). We know that 1919 of these seedlings were then sent to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) under the charge of one of the Kew gardeners, William Chapman, where there were three days of panic as no one had arranged for the harbour dues to be paid. However, the seedlings were eventually released and 1700 survived to be planted at the Heneratgoda Gardens in Colombo. By 1880 it was reported that only some 300 were still alive. At the same time that the seedlings were dispatched to Sri Lanka, two cases, containing a total of fifty seedlings, were sent to Singapore for the attention of H. J. Murton, who had been placed in charge of the Singapore Botanical Gardens in the previous year. These were offloaded and left in a shed for a month before being collected—dead. As the Kew Report of 1876 succinctly says: In the case of Singapore . . . Owing to the delay on the part of the India Office in paying the freight the case did not come into the hands of the Superintendent of the Botanical Gardens to whom they should have been consigned till the plants were nearly all dead.

In September 1876 a further 100 seedlings were sent to Sri Lanka. These were presumably from ‘Wickham seedling’ cuttings as no new source was known to have come into the UK until the botanist and explorer Robert Cross, whom Markham had sent to the Amazon to provide back-up in case of Wickham’s failure, returned in November of that year with just over 1000 Heveas, as well as some Cearas and Castilloas. Kew gave away just over half of these but retained 400, from which about two dozen survived. We also know that 100 plants went to Sri Lanka in the summer of 1877 and a further 50 to India. In all, by the end of 1877, Kew had distributed over 3000 seedlings; this was vastly more than their primary stock, so there must have been considerable

Tears of the Tree 94 propagation from cuttings. Sri Lanka then forwarded 22 seedlings, probably from that delivery of 100, to Singapore. All of these survived and Sir Henry Ridley, Director of the Singapore Botanical 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. Unfortunately, in spite of all the detailed records kept by Kew, one piece of information is missing, and that is the certain source of those 100 seedlings. We do not know whether they were propagated from ‘Wickham’ or ‘Cross’ plants. Whilst many writers claim, without giving verifiable references, that they were from ‘Wickham’ plants, we have the firm opinion of Ridley that they appeared different from the original (Wickham) seedlings and that they were from ‘Cross’ plants. He made this claim many times in his career and maintained it to the end. The last paragraph of a letter written by him to W. B. Turrill at Kew in 1950 (see Fig. 6.3) reads: I conclude therefore that the 22 plants which were sent to Singapore from which almost all the cultivated plantations derived are from Cross not Wickham.

Fig. 6.3 The last paragraph of Ridley’s letter of 1950.

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95 This remains yet another great unanswered question in the ‘biography’ of natural rubber. The question was first raised with Kew in 1910 by P. J. S. Cramer of the Botanic Gardens at Buitenzorg, in W. Java, Indonesia, possibly resulting from earlier discussions with Ridley. He was answered by David Prain at Kew, who said that there was no chance that Cross’s seeds could be involved. However, if we look at p. 88 of the Selected papers from the Kew Bulletin. III—Rubber, there is the statement that Robert Cross: . . . arrived at Kew on 21st November 1876. He brought with him about 1080 seedlings without soil, of which, with the greatest care, scarcely 3% could be saved. About 100 plants propagated at Kew from these were subsequently sent to Ceylon.

Another early report—W. Wicherley (one-time Head of Botany at the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia) writing in The whole art of rubber growing (1911)—repeats the observation, including the dispatch of 100 of the Cross seedlings to Sri Lanka. All of the information from a variety of sources can be tabulated as follows. 14 June 1876 Wickham arrives at Kew with around 70 000 seeds. 12 August–October 1876 Kew sends to Ceylon 1919 Wickham seedlings. August–September 1786 Kew sends to Singapore 50 Wickham seedlings (died in harbour). September–November 1876 Kew sends to Ceylon 100 Wickham seedlings. 21 November 1876 Cross arrives at Kew with 1080 seedlings. Early 1877 Kew sends to Ceylon 100 Cross seedlings. 11 June 1877 Ceylon sends to Singapore 22 Cross or Wickham seedlings?

96

Tears of the Tree October 1877 Singapore to Perak: 9 or 10 from these 22 seedlings sent to Malaysia as the basis for most of the plantation industry.

One small ‘fly in the ointment’ remains and this is a letter from H. J. Murton to Kew, dated 6 September 1877: Our climate is evidently suited for the growth of Hevea, judging by the growth the plants you sent last year have made.

This must refer to the first batch of seedlings, sent in late 1876; but, judging by the considerable evidence that all or virtually all of these had died due to maladministration, this could be an attempt by Murton to salvage his position now that he had the second delivery, should anyone come to inspect them. It did him little good as his career came to an abrupt end two years later when he was convicted of embezzlement and sent to prison. In any event, William Anderson (Chairman of the Raffles Library and Museum, Singapore) wrote to the Colonial Secretary on 30 September 1876 saying that Murton had told him that, by the time he had been notified of the seedlings’ arrival, they were all dead. In summary therefore, and contrary to what some authors claim, on p. 88 of the Selected papers from the Kew Bulletin. III— Rubber Dr Trimen clearly states that the 100 seedlings sent from Kew to Sri Lanka in 1877 were Cross seedlings. His comment that Cross’s contribution was small reflected the fact that this 100 should be compared with the 1919 (þ100) Wickham seedlings which had been shipped to Ceylon, but, this comment is not relevant as we are only concerned with the 22 seedlings which were subsequently sent to Singapore. What is still undetermined is whether those 22 seedlings sent from Ceylon to Singapore came from this last batch of seedlings (apparently from Cross if Trimen

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97 and Ridley are to be believed) or were from other (Wickham) stock held there. Whether the truth can ever be established now is doubtful, but perhaps we should consider Cross, not Wickham, to be the ‘father of the rubber plantation industry’. It should be added that a further shipment of Hevea, Castilloa, and Ceara seedlings held at Kew from Cross’s travels were dispatched to Sri Lanka on 15 September 1877, but these were too late to be the source of the famous 22 seedlings. In Sri Lanka experimental plantings were carried out at the Botanic Gardens at Heneratgoda and Peradeniya, the latter being in the highlands near Candy. The planters were not convinced that Hevea was the best option and they also experimented with Ficus elastica, as well as Castilloa and Ceara. Initially, the last two were favoured because of their quick maturation, but were eventually displaced by the slower growing but higher yielding Hevea. By 1882 the young plants were bearing seeds and the further development of government plantations in India was through this route. ‘Private’ demand for the seeds, however, was poor as many planters had been made bankrupt by the coffee blight which had struck a few years earlier, and those who had survived had already replanted with tea or moved to Malaysia to start afresh. Indeed, in 1887 Kew received 2000 seeds from Sri Lanka in the hope that a home could be found for them as they were not wanted there. Soon, however, the situation had changed, and by the 1890s it was reported that some planters were doing so well from their seed sales that they saw no need to go through the daily grind of tapping! In the Botanic Gardens, Dr H. Trimen was active in developing tapping procedures so that he could get an ongoing supply of latex from each tree in such a way that it would produce for an appreciable number of years. His results led him to conclude that

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Fig. 6.4 Henry Wickham with one of the original Heveas at Heneratgoda in 1911.

rubber had a viable future in the country, so he set out to convince both the Government and the private tappers that this was the case. In 1896 he was succeeded by J. C. Willis, who had the added impetus of being able to promote rubber due to the falling prices for tea, and he was also able to obtain considerable government assistance towards a replanting programme. From this a thriving plantation industry developed, although, after an initial very rapid growth, land restrictions precluded the continuing expansion which took place in Malaysia. Figures for acreage under rubber in

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99 Ceylon were: 1900, 1000 acres; 1905, 66 000 acres; 1910, 258 000 acres; and 1920, 433 000 acres. Although many samples of Sri Lankan Hevea rubber were sent to the UK for evaluation, it is generally accepted that 1899 marked the first commercial exportation of plantation rubber from that country. Returning to the Malaysian peninsular, it should not be thought that the arrival of 22 seedlings in Singapore in 1877 created the Malaysian plantation industry overnight. Indeed, officialdom was not particularly interested in the idea as the country had tin, and the mining of this was exceedingly profitable. Murton planted 10 seedlings in the Singapore Botanical Gardens and in October he contacted the Resident—Sir Hugh Low—who expressed an interest in the plants and their potential. Murton then set out with 10 of the seedlings for the Residency at Kuala Kangsar. Nine seedlings were planted in the Residency gardens, where they were nurtured by Hugh Low, whilst the tenth was believed to have been planted in Taiping, although no trace of it was found when Hugh Low looked for it the following year. One of the 9 seedlings still exists as the photograph in Fig. 6.5 shows. Investigations of both Hevea and indigenous rubber-producing plants were carried out by Murton, at the Singapore Botanical Gardens, and by his successor, N. Cantly. In 1885 Cantly claimed that the latter offered better commercial potential. Meanwhile, in 1884 Frank Swettenham, later to be the High Commissioner of the Federated Malay States, planted 400 Hevea seeds from the Kuala Kangsar trees in Perak. More were planted in Selangor between 1883 and 1885 by T. H. Hill, although these were possibly ornamental rather than commercial plantings. In 1888 Henry Ridley, a former gardener at Kew, then aged just thirty-five, was appointed Director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens and suggested that the Government should consider large-scale plantings since there was little private interest in

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(a)

(b)

Fig. 6.5 (a) One of the original Heveas planted at Kuala Kangsar in 1877, and (b) its associated plaque.

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101 planting crops which would take five years or more to start paying their way. He was able to use his additional position as Supervisor of the Straits Forest Department to carry out plantings in both Singapore and in the vicinity of Malacca, and, like Trimen in Sri Lanka, he investigated different ways of cultivating and tapping the trees to optimise the yield. He published his ideas in 1897 and, following these, Curtis in Penang and Derry in Kuala Kangsar obtained yields of latex from which they were able to calculate that rubber production could be profitable. It was also noted from samples sent to England that there would be a ready market for plantation rubber as it was much cleaner and more consistent in quality than the wild rubbers of either Africa or Amazonia. It is perhaps ironic that another Brazilian commodity had pushed Malaysia into rubber, whereas in Sri Lanka it had had the opposite effect. Various government inducements had encouraged planters to create and expand plantations and many of these chose coffee as their main crop. The price of coffee had been high due to production problems in Brazil, but, by the mid-1890s, these problems had been overcome and the fungal disease which had wiped out the Sri Lankan industry was attacking the Malaysian plants. In 1895 Tan Chay Yan planted forty-three acres of Hevea on his estate at Bukit Lintang in Malacca and the Kindersleys planted a further five acres in Selangor. These were the first commercial rubber estates in Malaysia and, as the coffee market collapsed, more and more planters turned to rubber. Initially the plantings were interspersed with cash crops, but by 1898 Stephens, in Perak, was planting dedicated rubber plantations. At about this time Ridley (now universally know as ‘Rubber Ridley’) noted that he had received requests for one million seeds in a single day! Although there was no mechanism for collecting reliable statistics on land usage prior to 1905, some idea of the speed at

Tears of the Tree 102 which the industry developed can be obtained from the following estimated figures for total rubber acreage in all of what is now Malaysia: 1898, 2000 acres; 1900, 6000 acres; 1905, 46 000 acres; 1910, 540 000 acres; and 1920, 2 180 000 acres. By 1920 wild rubber had been essentially consigned to history and plantation rubber had arrived with a vengeance. However, the story of Brazilian rubber does not quite end there. Henry Ford wanted a more controllable source of rubber for his car tyres, so in 1928 he purchased some 25 000 square kilometres of land sixty miles south of Santarem, on which he set out to create not only a plantation but also a complete town for his workers. He named it ‘Fordlandia’. Unfortunately, he encountered numerous difficulties and after five years only about ten (a)

(b)

Fig. 6.6 (a) H. N. Ridley with a Hevea tree showing herringbone tapping. (b) A modern tapping panel. Thin slivers are removed each time the tree is tapped. By tapping progressively the trunk can regenerate and the process can continue.

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103 square kilometres per year were being planted. It was obvious that the venture was never going to succeed, so Ford abandoned the site and in the early 1930s began work at ‘Fordlandia II’ or ‘Belterra’ on a new site much closer to Santarem. Although he imported high-yielding rubber seeds from Asia, labour problems and poor soil conditions, resulting in stunted growth, again doomed the venture, which Ford finally abandoned in the late 1930s, selling out to the Brazilian Government for a pittance in 1945. Then the story ended! Let us now return to Henry Wickham. He and his wife were back in England in June 1876, and in July and August Wickham persisted in trying to persuade the Director of the Botanic Gardens at Kew (Dr Joseph Hooker) to employ him so that he might accompany some of the young rubber seedlings to areas of the tropics then under Britain’s control and complete what he now saw as his mission. Hooker rejected the idea, having no proof of, or faith in, Wickham’s arboricultural expertise. So Wickham took the £700 paid to him for delivering the seeds and set out with his wife for a new life in Queensland, where he intended to grow tobacco and coffee. Life in the Amazon basin had been very difficult for him and it had no intention of getting better! A change in the wind direction caused the fire he had started to clear scrubland to set fire to the thatched cottage which he had built, and the building, with all their possessions, was destroyed. A second dwelling was built— this time with a corrugated-iron roof which was ripped off in a storm. Finally, he was left with massive debts when his partner, for whom he had stood guarantor, walked away from the business. He sold up, cleared the debt, and returned to England. Shortly after his return in November 1886 he was on his way to British Honduras, where he obtained a government post. His wife joined him and, for once, her diaries showed a degree of contentment with their social existence. Wickham, however,

Tears of the Tree 104 longed for life in the wild and started another plantation some sixty miles from ‘civilisation’. On this occasion there were problems with his lease and during his long legal argument over the land rights he petitioned Queen Victoria directly. Having apparently taken advice from King Solomon, she wrote on his solicitor’s statement ‘Let justice be done. Victoria R and I.’ The ‘justice’ finished with Wickham again having to sell up and return to England in poverty in 1893. Next he turned to the sea and took a concession to develop a small group of coral islands to the south-east of Papua New Guinea, the Conflict Group. These islands turned out to be aptly named because, after two years without seeing another white woman, his wife had finally had enough and returned to England, never to see her husband again, although she lived a month longer than he, dying in late 1928. As always, he was hampered by a lack of investment capital and negligible business acumen. Although he had one more try at developing a rubber plantation on New Guinea, he eventually gave up these enterprises and returned to England; his final return being in 1911. Even in England he continued to speak his mind on how rubber trees should be planted, cultivated, and tapped, and he invented various devices such as tapping knives and rubbersmoking machines. As the reader might expect by now, his ideas on rubber cultivation were contrary to the pragmatic ‘best practice’ developed in the Far East, whilst his inventions were commercial failures. In 1911 he at last gained some financial reward from the rubber industry with the gift of a silver salver, a £1000 cheque, and an annuity purchased with a further £1000. In 1920 he was knighted for ‘services in connection with the rubber plantation industry in the Far East’ and in 1926 the American oil magnate Edgar B. Davis presented him with

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105

Fig. 6.7 Sir Henry Wickham, 12 october 1926.

a cheque for £6000 as an 80th birthday present. Soon afterwards the British Government of Malaysia gave him £8000. Two years later he was dead. What then can one make of Sir Henry Wickham? One view was expressed by Henry Ridley, the person who, more than any other, persuaded the country we now know as Malaysia to develop rubber plantations: I looked on him as a failed planter who was lucky in that for merely traveling home with a lot of seeds had received a knighthood and enough money to live comfortably in his old age . . . He ordered natives to bring him in the seeds and to pack them in crates and put them on board ship. One cannot help feeling he was jolly well

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paid for a little job. He was no agriculturalist, he knew nothing about rubber and cared not for it . . . As for his abilities in planting I should say he had none.

Edward Lane, one of the very few people to have studied Wickham’s life in detail, wrote of him in 1953 as an ardent imperialist with little business acumen and with an autocratic manner which made him difficult to get on with, yet he was a staunch and loyal friend to those he really liked. Fordyce Jones, a close friend in Wickham’s later years, called him: a great man . . . whom to know was to love and whom all those in the rubber industry who have its interests at heart have affectionately called its ‘father’.

Although these remarks consider different aspects of the one man and his life, there seems little conflict between them. He was

Fig. 6.8 Tapping Hevea trees on a modern Malaysian plantation.

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107 domineering, egocentric, but a true friend. His business acumen was undoubtedly hopeless, but, at one point in his life, he was ‘in the right place at the right time’. In order to boost his ego and standing, he had to make an adventure out of a simple voyage, and in so doing his exaggerations and deceptions hid beyond recovery the truth of his one successful activity which certainly did change the world for ever (if the 22 seedlings really were from his seeds and not from those of Robert Cross!).

7 The King and the Congo In the early 1880s the article shown in Fig. 7.1 appeared in a British magazine. But the truth was somewhat different. In the previous chapters we have seen that wild natural rubber could be obtained from many plants and that these are widely distributed across the tropics, sub-tropics, and even the temperate regions of the Earth. However, only one region other than Amazonia made a significant contribution to the world’s supply of this material during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this was the Congo. The timescale over which the development of this trade occurred closely mirrored that of the Amazon basin but its gestation was very different. The Amazon region had long been noted as the source of natural rubber and production naturally rose in an attempt to meet a growing demand. The methods by which this was brought about will be discussed in the next chapter and, depending on one’s viewpoint, could be ascribed to enthusiastic entrepreneurs or to ‘robber barons’ operating within their own very private fiefdoms. The exploitation of the Congo grew out of one man’s lust for money with which to establish a family dynasty, together with his remarkable ability to convince a broad spectrum of European politicians and businessmen that he was a great humanitarian and that he was acting with pure altruism. That man was Leopold II, King of the Belgians.

The King and the Congo

Fig. 7.1 How to get rich in the Congo.

109

Tears of the Tree 110 Leopold’s story begins with the foundation of the free and independent state of Belgium on 20 January 1831. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coberg was eventually chosen as its king and came to the throne later that year. On his death in 1865, his son, the Duke of Brabant, who was just three months younger than the country, became King Leopold II. In accepting the kingship his father had also agreed to be bound by the Constitution which, it was thought, would keep him in his place, but, it contained a fatal flaw. The king was Commander-in-Chief of the army and was therefore in charge of the nation’s defence. This obviously required considerable interaction with his European neighbours and so enabled him to take control of foreign affairs, a useful portfolio to pass to his son. Leopold II seemed not to have had a particularly happy upbringing. He was tall, thin, and, according to many reports, he had an enormous nose. He was also idle (or suffered from late development) but he did develop a passion for the accumulation of data of all description, which he filed, classified, and crossreferenced. His father does not seem to have been particularly fond of him, but in later years acknowledged that he was his own man and that, whilst abrasive and over-sure of himself, he was also showing signs of subtleness and a manipulative ability which would manifest themselves with a vengeance in the not too distant future. Belgium’s problem was that neither the country nor the monarchy was built on ‘old money’. The new country had passed through many crises in its first thirty-four years and was now reasonably rich as well as politically neutral. Leopold II was certainly not rich and this led him to argue that Belgium could not stand still but should strengthen her position by becoming even richer, in the anticipation that some of the wealth might rub off on him. Given his inherited position as director of foreign affairs, it


111 seemed an obvious move to consider which accessible parts of the world remained unclaimed by existing colonial powers and what riches he could seize therefrom for his country and himself. The first question was where to start. He had already travelled extensively, visiting Egypt in 1855 and again in 1864 en route to China via India and the Malay States. As a result of these travels he had identified three types of colony: the slave, the white e´migre´, and that containing large numbers of indigenous workers under white control. He identified the last as being the most appropriate for his purpose and he noted of Java, where forced labour was used, that it was ‘the only way to civilise and moralise these idle and corrupt populations’. Nevertheless, he appreciated that he would have to be rather more circumspect in presenting his intentions to those whose help he wished to solicit in his endeavours. It was soon brought home to him that neither the prospect of an external source of income nor an appeal to patriotism would galvanise his fellow countrymen into activity. His plans became one stage clearer when he wrote, in 1863, ‘Belgium does not exploit the world, it is a taste we have got to make her learn.’ Over the next ten years Leopold investigated a number of possible countries in which he might have been able to take, or purchase, influence, but none proved acceptable. However, in August 1875 a letter to a confidante contained the sentence, ‘I intend to find out discreetly whether there may not be anything to be done in Africa.’ It took little effort on his behalf to focus down from ‘Africa’ to ‘the Congo’, a virtually blank area on the map which had recently become the subject of renewed interest following the discoveries and writings of Livingstone, Speke, Baker, and Burton into the interrelationship between the Nile, the Lualaba, and the Congo river itself. At first glance it may have seemed an obvious choice to settle some of the arguments by following the Congo inland from

Tears of the Tree 112 the western seaboard and to see where one finished up, but the complex of rapids and cataracts 100 or so miles inland made further navigation impossible. Indeed, it had been tried in 1875 by a German team but their efforts failed after a few days. At the end of that same year Lovatt Cameron turned up on the west coast, near Luanda, after a two and a half year journey through the heart of Africa from the east coast. Some of his comments struck crucial chords with Leopold. Tales of rich mineral deposits, grain, and rubber triggered his financial lust, whilst the stories of the Arab slavers with their heavily laden caravans provided an opportunity for him to appeal to Belgian missionary zeal and, hopefully, gain access to the country through apparently altruistic and honourable means. Two problems remained; the first was how to bring about this move into the Congo without upsetting or alarming the other European nations, and the second was how to extract any valuable ‘assets’ without, at best, having to share them with another country or, at worst, precipitating open hostilities. This was to be resolved at the Brussels Conference of 1876 in a manner which proved how well Leopold had learned to manipulate, lie, and distort facts during his formative years. His father was to be proved right but he would not have approved. The Brussels Conference was a gathering of scientists, explorers, and geographers. They came from Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, and they were all famous names. It was completely non-political and Leopold’s proposition was that Central Africa should not be a place of national squabbles and bickerings, but that an international body should be set up which would suppress slavery and develop the country and its infrastructure through normal and fair commercial practices. Exploration would be controlled by the geographers, whilst national sub-committees would be set up through existing learned


113 bodies which would be financed by national governments but not subject to political control or influence. In his opening speech, on 12 September, Leopold laid out his ‘public’ position: The subject which brings us together today is one of those which must be the supreme preoccupation to all friends of humanity. To open to civilisation the only area of our globe to which it has not yet penetrated . . . a crusade worthy of this century of progress. . . . Many of those who have made the closest study of Africa have come to the conclusion that their common purpose would be well served by a conference to get their work in step, to concert efforts, to share all resources and to avoid covering the same ground twice . . . Need I say that in bringing you to Brussels I was guided by no motives of egoism? Belgium may be a small country but she is happy and contented with her lot. I have no other ambition than to serve her well.

He then set out the following three points to be addressed. 1. Location of bases and whether they are to be acquired by treaty or purchase from the natives. 2. Location of routes to the interior, with the setting up of posts for scientific research, the abolition of slavery, and the education of the natives. 3. Establishment of the central and national committees, and deciding the best way to appeal to each nation’s charitable instincts for finance. The meeting then established the international authority itself, formally known as the ‘Association Internationale pour Reprimer la Traite et Ouvrir l’Afrique Centrale’ but more commonly known as the ‘Association Internationale Africaine’ (or AIA). This was to be managed by an ‘International Committee’ chaired by Leopold on the understanding that the chair would progress annually through

Tears of the Tree 114 different national representatives. There was then established an ‘Executive Committee’ and the various ‘National Committees’. It was a remarkable conference and altruism, coupled with the spirit of pure research, triumphed—for a short time. The International Committee met again in 1877 and, forgetting its own rules, re-elected Leopold to the chair. It never met again. The Executive Committee reported on the AIA’s operations until 1880, whilst, with the exception of that of Belgium, the National Committees never even saw the light of day. Leopold’s intention at that time was somehow to find a way for Belgium to take control of the AIA, but over the next two years it became a political brickbat, with all political parties as well as the Catholic Press putting their selective interpretations on what the AIA was really up to. Fortunately for Leopold, none deduced his real intent of using its ostensible purpose as a front to pacify and confuse the other nations whilst he got his colony up, running, and secure, but it rapidly became obvious to him that Belgium was unfit to receive the polished jewel which he was creating. He would just have to establish his own private colony in the Congo basin. The new question was whom could Leopold trust to set up such a structure? He would have to know something of the African native, believe in himself, be prepared to use force where necessary, and yet, at the same time, at least initially whilst the scheme gathered momentum, be gullible and unappreciative of Leopold’s true intent. Out of the jungle, having taken almost three years to cross Africa from Lake Tanganyika down the Lualaba and the Congo to the West African Coast, came Henry Morton Stanley (see Fig. 7.2). H. M. Stanley is known to the world as the American journalist who issued the immortal greeting ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’ in


115

Fig. 7.2 ‘Henry Morton Stanley’.

November 1871 when he located the missing explorer at Ujiji. In fact, he was neither ‘Henry’, nor ‘Morton’, nor ‘Stanley’, nor American, and it is arguable whether his journalism was based more on fact than on fiction. He was born in Wales in 1841, one of several illegitimate children of Betsy Parry, and his birth certificate identifies him, with little subtlety, as ‘John Rowlands— Bastard’, the first of many indignities which contributed to the character which Leopold found so useful. The first six years of his life were spent with his grandfather who did not believe in sparing the rod and, when he died, John was deposited in the St Asaph Union Workhouse. Here he seems to have been the recipient of

Tears of the Tree 116 the worst kinds of Victorian sexual and physical abuse, but gained a passion for geography, an elegant script, and a bible as a prize from a local bishop. At fifteen he left St Asaph’s and for two years lived as the ‘poorhouse boy’ with various relatives before shipping to New Orleans on a split-second impulse. In a series of moves which would be recognised by any psychiatrist today, he then began a process of reinvention, taking on the name of the merchant who befriended him when he landed and inventing a whole new autobiography. There is no doubt that his early childhood left him with what would today be called ‘sexual hang-ups’ and it can be no coincidence that, in years to come, he departed on two of his African journeys soon after becoming engaged. Neither lady waited for him. After a stint in the American Civil War—fighting for the Confederates at the battle of Shiloh and then for the Union Navy bombarding Confederate ports in North Carolina—he started his journalistic career writing freelance articles and then turned to covering the Indian wars for a variety of Eastern papers. The conflict between the papers’ desire for stories of blood and thunder and the fact that the wars were virtually over and that Stanley’s time was spent covering peace missions was easily resolved, as his fictional reports of the Indians on the warpath showed. His reports and style were appreciated by the publisher of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett Junior who hired him to cover the British–Abyssinian war. Here, foresight and luck played equal parts in the advancement of Stanley. He had already bribed the telegraph operator in Suez to send his dispatches before all others and, just after his report of a British victory, the telegraph cable out of Suez broke, so no more dispatches could be sent. This scoop, in June of 1868, resulted in his being given a permanent position as a roving reporter on the Herald, but it took


117 until the end of 1871 for him to become a household name, as famous as the explorer whom he had found. This mattered to Stanley, who never regarded exploration as anything more than the establishment of a factual framework within which he might weave his arguably fictional tales of daring-do and thus obtain the riches he never had as a child. His books were so popular that it would be fair to identify him as the first of a long sequence of professional travel writers, but, once again, he was fortunate. Livingstone died in Africa and did not return to Britain, where his story might well have conflicted with that of Stanley’s as told in How I found Livingstone. Stanley was now thirty years old. Yet again, his past returned to haunt him as the ‘upper crust’ Royal Geographic Society refused to acknowledge his exploring abilities, and rumours about his birth began to spread. This could be professionally damaging to an ‘American’ writing for an antiBritish paper in the US. His insecurity was further increased when he discovered that his fianceé had married whilst he was away. His answer—to return to Africa—could be considered escapism or a need for more background for his next book. Finance was available from Gordon Bennett, Levy-Lawson of the UK Daily Telegraph, and others for an Anglo-American expedition to solve a number of geographical problems relating to the land west of Lake Tanganyika and, particularly, to establish the relationship between the Rivers Lualaba, Nile, Niger, and Congo. Livingstone had thought that the Lualaba formed the headwaters of the Nile, but Lovatt Cameron believed it fed the Congo. Stanley initially favoured the Niger but slowly came to prefer the Congo. The world wanted to know and he could see money in a book. The expedition set off in 1874 with Stanley, three other whites whose lack of experience suggested that they had been chosen so that they would not detract from Stanley’s glory, and their main means of transport, the Lady Alice, a forty-foot steam launch which

Tears of the Tree 118 divided into five sections for portage. The boat was named after Stanley’s second fianceé, the seventeen-year-old Alice Pike. The expedition also contained over 300 Africans. Stanley’s attitude to the natives was exactly what Leopold required and can best be illustrated by two examples. Stanley was, of course, equipped with the most up-to-date armaments and was perfectly happy to fight his way past any tribal opposition, particularly when it consisted of bows, arrows, and spears, with the occasional antique muzzle loader. He noted that: ‘we have attacked and destroyed twenty-eight large towns and three or four score villages’. However, when necessary, he was capable of a more subtle approach, illustrated in his conversion of the Emperor of Uganda to Christianity. This was brought about by making him aware of the church’s eleven commandments, the one we would not recognise being that man must ‘honour and respect kings as they are envoys of God’. Starting down the Lualaba, Stanley travelled several hundred miles before the first portage round ‘Stanley Falls’ and then he had a clear run of almost 1000 miles to ‘Stanley Pool’. Lest it be thought that his egotism was running a little high, he named Mount Gordon Bennett, the Gordon Bennett River, the Levy Hills, and Mount Lawson after his main sponsors. The naming of ‘Stanley Pool’ was at the insistence of one of the other whites, Frank Pocock, or so Stanley claimed; but as Mr Pocock, like Stanley’s other two white companions, died on the expedition we can only take his word for that. The final 200 or so miles west of Stanley Pool to the coast were a continuous string of rapids and waterfalls, which made Stanley realise that he was on the River Congo. The boats were abandoned and a desperate four and a half months of marching through the jungle were needed to arrive at Bomba. The epic Through the dark continent, published by Stanley in 1878, tells all from his point of view in his established and popular


119 style, although one fact which is missing is the number of native survivors. We know that Stanley was the lone survivor of the four whites who set out, and that the death toll amongst the natives was massively high. Perhaps Stanley’s failure to record this detail just reflected his lack of interest in the trivial details of his successful expedition. The only sour note to be sounded was when he discovered that his second fianceé had preferred the ‘bird in the hand’ and had married an American railway heir a few months after they had separated. He would have been more distressed to know that in later years, after his death, she claimed remorse that she had not waited for him and professed that it was her spirit, together with the physical presence of the Lady Alice, which had motivated and carried him across Africa. Leopold had found his man. In fact, Stanley had first come to Leopold’s attention when his plans to follow the Lualaba downstream had been announced three years earlier. Leopold believed in Lovatt Cameron’s supposition that the Rivers Lualaba and Congo were linked, and he was also aware that in 1874 Lovatt Cameron had annexed the Congo in the name of Queen Victoria—only to have the British Government reject the annexation as soon as it heard of it. Leopold’s immediate problem now was how to recruit Stanley without alerting the British. He therefore resolved to employ Stanley to explore the Congo basin and establish some posts under the auspices of the AIA. A little early discussion with Stanley seemed a good idea, so he sent two emissaries to meet him at Marseilles, where his train had stopped en route to Britain from Italy. Stanley was not interested; he wanted plaudits from his countrymen (the British) and time to write his book. Inevitably, Leopold had to use a small coterie of trusted employees in his machinations, but some consciences were

Tears of the Tree 120 pricking and questions were being asked as to how Stanley could be offered this position without the approval of the Executive Committee of the AIA, and what exactly was the purpose of the posts which he was to establish. The situation would soon become clear to those in the know and more complex to everybody else. By June 1878 Stanley had become tired of the negative attitude of the British Government, which was too tied up in Egypt and the Nile to consider further African undertakings, so he travelled to Brussels for a meeting with Leopold. The two got on well, but Stanley emphasised that the first stage of any useful opening-up of the Congo required a railway round the lower falls and rapids. Funding was a problem, but a proposal from the Dutch traders at the mouth of the Congo for a ‘study syndicate’ fitted nicely into the ostensible purposes of the AIA, and a group of European financiers agreed to support this. The syndicate came into being as the ‘Comite´ d’Etudes du Haut-Congo’. Its terms of reference were never published, but came to light in 1918 and included a clause excluding the Comite´ from taking any political action. Like so many of Leopold’s clauses and contracts, this seems to have faded into oblivion very quickly if one considers the evidence of a document found in the Belgian Foreign Ministry archives. Leopold writing to Stanley: . . . It is a question of creating a new State as big as possible and running it . . . there is no question of granting political power to Negroes . . . the white man will head the stations which will be populated by free and freed Negroes. Every station would regard itself as a little republic . . . The work will be directed by the King [Leopold] who attaches particular importance to the setting up of the stations . . . the best course of action would be to secure concessions of land from the natives for the purposes of roads and cultivation and to found as many stations as possible . . . should we not try to extend the influence of the stations over the neighbouring chiefs and form a Republican Confederation of native


121

freedmen. The President [of the Confederation] will hold his powers from the King.

The emphasis on ‘freed men’ fitted in with the aims of the AIA and gave Leopold the time he needed to implement his real schemes, more honestly set out in a private letter to Stanley in August 1878. Stanley was to acquire as much land as possible by purchase or concession on behalf of the Comite´, which would set out the laws of this ‘free state’ with Leopold, as a private citizen, at its head. Although Stanley obtained close to 1 000 000 square miles of the Congo for Leopold, the latter was not happy as the French, through Count Savorgnan de Brazza, established a camp at Stanley Pool, the site of the future Brazzaville. What Stanley did not know was that the Comite´ d’Etudes du Haut-Congo no longer existed! In November 1878 Leopold announced to his shareholders that most of the money used to found it had been spent and the rest was committed to contracts already underway. He felt very sorry about this, but was prepared to return their original investments in full and offer them preference should any commercial undertakings grow from the enterprise. All he asked was that the Comite´ be dissolved. This was agreed and the Comite´ d’Etudes du Haut-Congo was immediately replaced by the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC) with 100% funding from Leopold. This fund provided the treasury of the Congo Free State, which was thus also owned by Leopold. The similarity of the names of the AIA and AIC were hardly coincidental. As Leopold wrote to a supporter, ‘care must be taken not to let it be obvious that the AIA and AIC are different, the public doesn’t grasp this.’ Leopold remained dissatisfied with Stanley’s qualities of leadership and in 1882, when Stanley was in Brussels, they discussed his possible successor. Leopold was interested in recruiting General Gordon, who was avidly anti-slavery and whom he had

Tears of the Tree 122 met earlier; he would be an ideal ‘front’ for the AIC. In 1883 Leopold offered him a position, suggesting that a field marshal’s position in the Congo would be a considerable advance on a generalship in England. Gordon accepted, but changed his mind when the British Government asked him to oversee the pacification of the Sudan and, specifically, to relieve the isolated garrison in Khartoum. He became trapped there and was killed in 1884. History now regards him as a hero and, whilst it may have been a bad career move in the very short term, it is doubtful whether he would have fared so well if he had chosen the Congo route. Although his financial position had now been strengthened, Leopold was still looking for international recognition and started with the United States of America as being the country least likely to understand the complexities of the pyramid of power which he was creating or, indeed, Africa itself. It proved relatively simple to confuse the Americans. In the President’s message to Congress in December 1883 the AIC was referred to as the AIA and the Comite´ d’Etudes du Haut-Congo was taken as a branch of the AIA. By February 1884 both Congress and the Senate recognised the flag of the AIC as that of the Congo Free States (not yet one state). Leopold then staged a magnificent coup by, in one statement, binding France, Germany, and Britain to his scheme. The statement, issued jointly by the AIC and the French Prime Minister, said in essence that the AIC would not cede any of its territory to any power, but that if it ever had to realise its assets then France would have first refusal. The contradiction went unnoticed or, at least, it was not commented on. Now France could relax, knowing it would have no problems with the AIC and could, potentially, have some rich pickings, whilst Germany and Britain now had no option but to support the AIC and so prevent it falling to the French.


123 Two items remained to be dealt with before Leopold had the kingdom he craved. The first was the Berlin Conference of 1884– 1885, arranged by a number of European powers in an attempt to sort out a range of conflicting land claims in Africa. Interestingly, it was not felt necessary to invite any Africans. Leopold busied himself negotiating numerous bilateral agreements, but had surprisingly little trouble in acquiring the million or so square miles of Central Africa which he sought, as well as the port of Matadi and the land on which to build his railway past the rapids. There were probably two reasons for the ease with which he was granted his claims. The first was that most delegates had never even seen Africa and believed that, for them, any wealth came from trading at the water’s edge. The second was that it was still believed that Leopold’s organisation, be it the AIA or AIC, was generating some sort of international colony which would be one giant freetrade area. It took Leopold just three months to clarify the nomenclature when, by royal decree, his privately purchased country became the ‘E´tat Inde´pendant du Congo’—the Congo Free State. Note that the ‘States’ approved by the US had become one state a one-letter difference which went unnoticed. His second problem was cash flow. His efforts to date had cost him a fortune and he still did not have his railway, which was essential for the transportation of the riches of the Congo from the interior to the coast in reasonable quantity. At this time he was still thinking of ivory, and rubber hardly featured in his calculations. In 1887, for instance, only thirty tons of rubber came out of the Congo. He needed money and turned to his own (first) country, Belgium, which was beginning to realise that there might, after all, be some financial benefits to be had from the Congo. Using a combination of his philanthropic record, the ‘French possession’ threat, and a will in which he left ‘all his sovereign rights’ in the Congo Free State to Belgium upon his death, he received an interest-free loan

Tears of the Tree 124 of £1 000 000 (1890 value). He promised to borrow no more without the prior approval of the Belgian Parliament and to repay the loan (or have the Congo annexed by Belgium) by the end of 1900. The French do not seem to have been consulted and, in a typical gesture of altruism, the king backdated his will by a year to August 1889, thus making it appear that his generosity had nothing to do with the ‘subsequent’ loan. Although the political wheeler-dealing, corruption, and lies continued to the end of Leopold’s reign, he now had his State, but to take full financial advantage of it he needed four fundamental things. He had to put in place posts throughout his new land in which to pace his administrators and their ‘enforcers’, ‘recruit’ a labour force, develop the river transport on the 1000 or so miles between Stanley Falls and the rapids, and build Stanley’s railway from east of the rapids to Matadi. In addition he needed stability. He was aware of the growing demand for rubber and of the competition he was facing from South America and the plantations in the Far East. He was now close to sixty years old and needed to make money fast. His idea for short-to-medium-term stability was simple: he would involve directly, and for their own financial benefit, influential political and commercial friends throughout Europe who would, in the preservation of their own interests, support him against his detractors. He also appreciated the particular advantage to himself that he would then be able to offload any approbation onto their shoulders and off his own! This was achieved by a decree of October 1892 which split the Congo into three zones. The first, the ‘Domaine Priveé’, was to be solely for his financial benefit and consisted of an area around Lake Leopold II and Lake Tumba. In 1901 it was supposed that it had been set up by a decree of 1896, reserving the land as ‘Crown property’, but this was subsequently shown to have been forged. The Domaine Priveé was about


125 ten times the area of Belgium. A second region was to be either sold on to new owners or distributed between concession companies. The largest of these companies, known as the ‘Anversoise’, was to be in the hands of his close friends, but, by 1898, a 50% interest had been acquired by the Congo State (Leopold). The next largest, the Anglo-Belgian India-Rubber Company (ABIR), was notionally under the chairmanship of an Englishman, Colonel North, although it later emerged that his financial stake was purchased with Leopold’s money. As with the Anversoise, Leopold soon owned at least 50% of the shares and the British interest reverted to the Belgian. Perhaps the most interesting area, from the point of view of Leopold’s machinations, was that situated around the River Kasai. This was designated a free-trade area, although Leopold’s organisation already controlled a major part of it and was particularly obstructive when independent traders tried to work within its ‘free’ economy. Within the 1892 decree was the comment, once again overlooked by all, that the free-trade rights would cease when Belgium ‘was in a position to take over the sovereignty of the Congo’. By the terms of the Belgian Government’s loan this was 1901 and, although Belgium did not take up its offer, it was in a position to do so. Leopold took over again, for once with the law on his side, and that was the end of free trade. With his land and position reasonably secure he could concentrate on transport and infrastructure. In 1890 Stanley’s railway was started at Matadi. Three years later it had advanced fourteen miles at a cost in African life which is, even now, unknown. The official figures claimed 1800 non-whites and 132 whites, but less official (and more reliable?) sources suggest that the 1800 figure only relates to the first two years of its construction. Nevertheless, the line was extended to Stanley Pool over the next five years and was then open for business.

Tears of the Tree 126 Three weeks of portage were reduced to two days of steampowered transportation. Leopold needed steamboats above the rapids well before the completion of the railway so that he could use the clear 1000 miles of river, and its tributaries, to put in place his administrative infrastructure. These boats had to be dismantled and carried past the rapids and, as an indication of what this involved, just one of the steamboats required over 3000 ‘porter loads’. With transport now under control Leopold could get his ivory and rubber out—when it had been collected. It has already been observed that his preferred modus operandi would be trading posts with a white man in charge of the native work force. The posts, with their white agents in charge, were put in place, but, since the native workers had to be coerced to do anything for the agents, a middle tier of management was required. This was supplied by soldiers of Leopold’s private army, the ‘Force Publique’, which supplied both garrisons for general area protection and local ‘sentries’. The officers of this army were generally whites, often from Belgium but sometimes from other countries, lent to Leopold to learn the techniques of native control. Other ranks were often enslaved as much as the rubber tappers proved to be. They were generally stationed far from home and were left to be self-supporting. However, possessing guns, they were one off the bottom of the pyramid of power and not actually on the bottom. That position was reserved for the tappers and their families. There were inevitably some mutinies, but, if these could be suppressed and the tappers forced to produce their full allocation of rubber, the soldiers had some chance of survival. Looking to the future, Leopold organised children’s camps, ostensibly under the auspices of the Catholic Church, which were intended to educate the native orphan children, but, in actuality, his purpose was to turn them into trustworthy soldiers.


127 The orphans tended to be collected from villages destroyed by the Force Publique and, if they were not orphans when they were found, they became so very soon afterwards. The control of gangs of labourers by armed supervisors is nothing new, but, because of the individual work of the natives in collecting the latex, a new protocol had to be developed by the agents and put into operation by the sentries and the Force Publique. The vine which produced most of the Congo rubber was of the landolphia genus, which climbed a convenient tree and then spread out through the upper branches of its neighbours. When one was first located the latex could be extracted by tapping or incising close to the ground, but the tappers then had to move higher and higher up the vine for subsequent tappings. More latex could be obtained by cutting completely though the vine, but this was terminal to the vine and forbidden. If caught doing this, it was also terminal for the tapper! As the vines close to a settlement ran dry the tappers had to move further out, often making journeys of a day or more. The usual trading goods of trinkets and the like were not of sufficient interest to the natives for them to put up with the rigours of a tapper’s life and Leopold had made certain that the Congo was, at least to the natives, a ‘no money’ economy. Money could give you power in that you might purchase guns or other undesirable products. Force was the obvious means of persuasion and this was better used against women and children than against the tapper, who might then be unable to work efficiently. A procedure was soon established and documented in the official manual given to all agents. The soldiers would arrive at a settlement, loot it of animals and any other items of value, destroy the buildings, capture the women and children, and imprison them in stockades built close to each trading post for just this purpose. They would then be ransomed against an arbitrarily decided weight of rubber.

Tears of the Tree 128 On returning with the rubber, the tappers often found that their women had been raped by the ‘sentries’ and/or had died from starvation or some disease. If the natives objected to the forced labour the settlement was wiped out. Since Leopold did not want to waste money, his agents knew exactly how many bullets were issued to each soldier and these were not to be used shooting game for food! The bullet usage was supposed to relate closely to the number of natives killed, and the soldiers supplied evidence of their kills by cutting the right hand from each corpse and smoking it so that it might be preserved for subsequent checking. When one agent suggested that the hands could have come from women, easier to catch and kill, penises were brought in to prove the honesty of the soldiers. Severed heads had been considered trophies of inter-tribal wars long before Leopold took an interest in the Congo, but he certainly had no objections to the continuation of the practice. One agent, Van Kerckhoven, paid his soldiers 1p per head ‘to stiffen their resolve during battle’, whilst another used twenty-one heads to decorate his flowerbeds. This is probably the origin of Marlow’s observation of Kurtz’s collection of heads in Joseph Conrad’s book The heart of darkness. In the ultimate statement of self-justification one agent reported how, when local villagers failed to meet their fish and manioc quota, he decapitated 100 of them: ‘There have been plenty of supplies ever since. My goal was ultimately humanitarian. I killed 100 people but this allowed 500 to live.’ Tales of horror and destruction could continue, but the point has been made and it is time to turn to the fall of Leopold. It has already been noted that he fought a running battle with his critics throughout his ‘Congo mission’, but for many years his outward altruism and humanity, as well as influential friends who


129 were also gaining from his efforts, protected him. One of the earliest attempts to bring him to some accountability was initiated by a black American soldier, lawyer, and preacher, James Washington Williams. Williams was already known in America as a proponent of black civil rights. In 1889 he wrote to Leopold suggesting that he could recruit black Americans to work in the Congo, where they could advance themselves in a way impossible in the US. He came to Europe, met and was impressed by Leopold, and in 1890 set out for Africa, where he spent six months touring the Congo. He was a civil rights activist and what he saw sickened him. His response was to write an Open letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, which was also published as a pamphlet and widely distributed throughout Europe. He wrote a similar letter to the President of the United States of America, President Harrison. In the ‘open letter’ he accused Leopold on eight major points: Stanley used a range of crude conjuring tricks to persuade the natives that he had supernatural powers and to induce them to sign over their tribal lands for trivial recompense. Stanley was not a hero but a cruel foul-mouthed tyrant. Leopold’s African soldiers had to be self-sufficient and the results—death of the unhelpful natives and the destruction of their villages—followed from that. Leopold’s soldiers were excessively cruel to their prisoners. There was no wise government, no schools and no hospitals for the natives. The judicial system was corrupt and unjust. Whites could get away (literally) with murder whilst blacks could receive terrible punishments, including death, for trivial, or even invented, offences. Kidnapping natives to be used as concubines by state officials was commonplace. Leopold’s government was systematically slave trading throughout the Congo.

Tears of the Tree 130 In a letter to America he coined a phrase which, still today, is the ultimate condemnation. He described Leopold’s operations in the Congo as ‘a crime against humanity’. Leopold immediately set out to discredit Williams, a now standard procedure when one cannot contest a person’s argument, and found a number of grounds on which to do so. His most fortunate break occurred when in August 1891 Williams died of tuberculosis aged just forty-one. The rumblings continued, but, without his passion to fan the flames, they slowly subsided. Even that august newspaper, The Times, saw fit to write a leader in 1895 which included: . . . a system of compulsion closely akin to slavery would be necessary before natives of the Congo Free State could be trained to regular voluntary labour.

Another black American missionary, William Henry Sheppard, was in the Congo at the same time as Williams and for partly the same reason—to find a country where black Americans could develop without segregation. Unlike Williams, however, he was based at one place, the Presbyterian mission which he and a colleague had established far up the River Kasai, the home of the Kuba people. This was so remote that it took eight years for Leopold’s soldiers to reach it, and during that time Sheppard established a remarkable rapport with the natives. He appears to have been one of the very few black men respected by both whites and blacks in the Congo at that time. With the arrival of the soldiers the world fell apart, the Kubas resisted with what they had and were massacred as thousands sought shelter in the mission. In 1899 Sheppard was told by his superiors to go into the jungle and find out what was happening. What he found were smoked right hands and the soldiers smoking them, for it was he who first publicised the practice in missionary


131 magazines throughout both Europe and the States. His, and other missionaries’, articles continued to infuriate Leopold, who in 1906 made it an offence punishable by a fine or imprisonment to commit any calumny against a Congo State official. After the first conviction of a Baptist minister, things quietened down a little, but in 1908 Sheppard published the story of another Kuba revolt and the way in which it was put down. The local concessionaires, the ‘Compagnie du Kasai’, demanded a retraction and, when Sheppard’s colleague pointed out to the company that they had a lot more charges to make, the Compagnie became more enraged. Whilst the arguments were continuing, the British Vice Consul visited the region with Sheppard as guide to prepare his own report. When this was published supporting Sheppard’s story, the company had had enough and sued Sheppard for libel. The judge reserved judgment as he worked out what to do. The Americans had made it clear that their attitude to Belgium’s claim on the Congo could depend on the result, whilst the judge’s career was obviously finished if he found for Sheppard. The verdict was clear. Since Sheppard had not named the Compagnie du Kasai in his article, it could be assumed that he was only blaming soldiers of chartered trading companies for the massacres and did not intend to make an attack on the defendant; Sheppard was innocent and the Compagnie not guilty. Although the story of Sheppard has been told in isolation, it forms only part of the greater story concerning the downfall of Leopold. If Leopold was the schemer and Stanley the realiser then E. D. Morel was their nemesis. Edmund Dene Morel was the son of an English widow who had been married to a Frenchman. At the age of seventeen he moved from Paris to Liverpool to become a clerk in the Elder–Dempster shipping line. He had no history of political activism; neither did he know, nor care, much about Africa. The shipping line had plied

Tears of the Tree 132 the routes to Africa for a number of years and held the contract for all cargo to and from Leopold’s Congo. Being bilingual he soon became the liaison officer between the line and the Congo officials in Belgium, and regularly visited Antwerp to compile and check the records of goods received and dispatched. It did not take him long to realise that a great fraud was being perpetrated—and that even worse things were happening. The fraud was obvious to someone used to dealing with figures. Leopold’s various trading companies and the Congo Government published certain trade figures for exports, whilst the amounts of ivory and rubber unloaded at Antwerp greatly exceeded them. Millions of pounds were floating loose somewhere. The more disconcerting discovery was that there were regular shipments of guns and ammunition out of Antwerp into the Congo, assigned to either the State itself or to various named trading companies. Coupled to this was the fact that over 80% of the goods being shipped to the Congo were of no benefit to the natives, but were intended to prop up the administrative system. How then were the ever-increasing quantities of ivory and rubber being paid for? He knew that money was not an option as the natives were not allowed to use it, and yet Elder–Dempster had a monopoly on all trade. The only answer must be that they were not being paid. They were, in fact, slave labour. At the end of the century, in his mid-twenties, Morel found his conscience and, blistering with outrage, set out to destroy Leopold and his operation in the Congo. He first revealed his suspicions to Sir Alfred Jones, head of the shipping line and also Honorary Consul in Liverpool to the Congo. Howerver, since Jones was more concerned with keeping his lucrative contract than on displaying moral principles, he was reluctant to stir the muddy waters. He did, however, promptly visit Leopold, who told him, in essence, that the natives had to be subdued for their


133 own long-term benefit and it would be better if this young clerk learned some discretion—quickly. The offer of a pay rise and a transfer away from the ‘Congo desk’ was rejected, only to be followed by a more blatant bribe which was again refused. In his younger days Morel had written some freelance articles for trade journals and found he had some flair for the written word so, in 1901, aged twenty-eight, he resigned and started his onslaught. Unfortunately, there were limits to what he could get published, so, two years later, he started his own paper, The West African Mail, in which he had total editorial control. Contrary to the philosophy of most newspapers, a good story to Morel was one of unimpeachable veracity and, whilst always writing with all the fury he could muster, he was infallibly accurate in everything he wrote. Every attempt by Leopold’s supporters to catch him out was foiled. On complaining that the story of natives being forced to work through the kidnapping of their women was false, Morel was ready with a copy of the form given by the ABIR to all its agents headed ‘Natives under bodily detention’ and an order on the upkeep and feeding of hostages. As Morel’s fame spread he received letters, reports, and copies of documents from a vast number of people, including employees of Leopold in the Congo and clerks in the Belgian offices of Congo companies. Missionaries, who had at last found a mainstream publisher outside the normal run of religious pamphlets and journals, willingly released their pent-up emotions and produced more irrefutable evidence—photographs. Of the eyewitness stories which Morel published, just one sums up Leopold’s Congo. It came from an American agent working for the ‘Anversoise’, Edward Canisius: . . . We had undergone six weeks of painful marching and had killed over 900 natives, men, women and children. The incentive? Adding fully twenty tons of rubber to the monthly crop.

Tears of the Tree 134 One of Morel’s supporters was Sir Charles Dilkes MP and in 1903 the Congo question was raised in the Houses of Parliament. A resolution was passed making clear Parliament’s belief in Morel’s writings and protesting over the treatment of the natives. It also expressed concern about Leopold’s failure to live up to his free-trade promises. Leopold became concerned and so started a campaign to present his side of the story: Britain was intent on destabilising his operations because British gin manufacturers wanted to export their product to innocent natives but his enlightened administration would stop them. Missionaries were bigots out to force their beliefs on everyone by any methods. The very profits he was making from the Congo showed how well the natives were being treated.

Would this be enough and had he bought enough politicians and businessmen for things to quieten down yet again? The answer was soon forthcoming; the Foreign Office sent a telegram to HM Consul in the Congo and asked him to investigate. The Consul was the thirty-nine-year-old Roger Casement, who had been in Africa for much of the last twenty years and had seen it all. Amongst other activities, he had worked for the surveyors on the ‘rapids railway’ and had spent a week with Stanley in the Congo. In 1890 he had shared rooms with a Polish ship’s officer, Jo´zef Konrad Korzeniowski, who was on his way to learn the secrets of the river so that he might take control of his own steamer. Six months was all he could take in the Congo and later, as Joseph Conrad, he wrote of the atrocities he had witnessed in The heart of darkness, a work of fiction embedded in fact. In 1892 Casement worked in what is today Nigeria and then transferred to the British Consular Service. In 1900 he was to set up the Consular Service in the Congo. He was fully aware of Leopold’s activities in the Congo and had already written to the Foreign


135 Office about them. Now he had permission to investigate officially and he was not to let either the natives or his government down. For over three months he travelled throughout the Congo and the more he learned the more sickened he became. He returned to Britain to write his report and, although it was written in the formal restrained way of a government document, the factual and graphic contents were much more than the Government expected or, perhaps, wanted. It was Casement, for instance, who dispassionately described the severing of penises in confirmation that the corpses which had provided right hands were males. Pressure to stop publication came from highly placed sources, including the British pro-Leopold Minister to Brussels, who wanted to ‘avoid being put in an awkward position at the (Belgian) court’, and the head of the Elder–Dempster shipping line, for more obvious financial reasons. The report had to be published, particularly since the frustrated Casement had given several interviews about its contents to the press, but, as a compromise, all names were purged. Casement seethed when Leopold’s apologists issued general denials which he was unable to defend with specifics. It appeared that the ‘sentries’ were to protect the tappers (from what or whom?) and those unfortunates with missing hands had had them amputated to prevent the spread of cancer of the hands. Luckily for Casement’s sanity, he had, by then, met Morel, whose work he had read whilst in the Congo, and the two men struck up an immediate strong friendship. Out of this meeting came, in 1904, the ‘Congo Reform Association’, the intention of which was to persuade European governments to take action against the abuses of human rights in the Congo. He knew that politicians prefer a quiet life whenever possible, so he sought out support from a wide range of lords, MPs, churchmen, and businessmen, and kept up a continuous barrage of public (and private) meetings and writings. Perhaps his most famous book is

Tears of the Tree 136 Red rubber: The story of the rubber trade flourishing on the Congo in the year of grace 1906 in which, in a central section of thirty-six pages, he documented close to 100 reports which he had received, from a broad spectrum of sources, concerning atrocities committed on the Congolese natives between 1890 and 1905. Each report was accompanied by a full provenance. As some indication of his prolific outpourings, it is estimated that he wrote over 3500 letters in the first half of that year (1906) alone. Leopold now realised that neither his words alone, nor those of his apologists, were enough to stop the rising tide of concern and resentment being orchestrated from Britain. He was presented with further problems when American missionaries lobbied President Roosevelt, claiming that, as the US was the first country to recognise the Congo Free State, it had a special responsibility to protect its indigenous population. Forced to act, predominantly in response to the Casement report, Leopold set up an ‘International Commission of Enquiry’ consisting of three judges, one from each of Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, who were to travel to the Congo to investigate Casement’s allegations. They returned to Belgium in March 1905, but Leopold kept their report suppressed until November of that year. In the meantime a Belgian Member of Parliament struck gold. He asked a provocative question: ‘Were bonuses still being paid to agents in inverse proportion to the value of the goods they exchanged for rubber and ivory?’ The Foreign Minister explicitly denied any such policy, only to have read out to him the confidential State documents confirming that this was official policy. The finally released report of the Commission of Enquiry was a shattering blow to the Belgian Government. It listed the following. 1. The land laws: contrary to the Berlin Directive and would militate against the development of native life.


2. 3. 4. 5.

137 Forced labour: applied with unpardonable ferocity and reprisals. Bonus system: unacceptable and dishonest. Powers to concession companies: intolerable. Legal system: biased and inadequate.

(Shades of Williams’ ‘open letter’ over a decade earlier.) Leopold’s choices were becoming very limited and became more so in March 1906 when a motion to revive the Annexation Bill of 1901 was passed in the Belgian Parliament. Leopold realised that he was beaten in terms of actual ‘ownership’ of the Congo, but he still had more than half a pack of cards to play in concealing the multiplicity of companies in which he had shares, or owned outright. He was content to hand over the administrative shell if he could keep the contents. He retreated to his yacht, the Alberta, and his Villa des Ce`dres on Cap Ferat, and prepared his defences. These would require their own chapter to detail, but they consisted of a series of defensive ‘walls’, built on the assumption that, as each defence fell, another would be there to back it up. In mid-1907 the Congolese and Belgians agreed to produce a draft treaty and negotiators were appointed, several of whom happened to be friends of Leopold. By the end of the year a draft treaty had been produced and signed which proved that Leopold had succeeded with his most important defence wall—the Belgian State pledged itself to recognise the Foundations existing in the Congo. This would include Leopold’s ‘Fondation de la Couronne’, formed as a ‘Fondation’ barely a year earlier but holding Leopold’s ‘Domaine de la Couronne’ (that tract of land ten times the area of Belgium) as its major asset, together with a massive portfolio of land holdings throughout Belgium and southern France, shares, and cash. The Government could not

Tears of the Tree 138 accept this and was surprised when Leopold gave way in early 1908. It had not appreciated the purpose of his ‘walls’ and by now he had finished putting most of his fortune out of reach of the Government. However, he still believed that he had a saleable asset. There was, and still is, no argument that a large amount of Leopold’s wealth went into building works throughout Belgium, and the Government agreed to take these over and complete them as well as taking responsibility for their many outstanding debts. Leopold himself kept the ‘goods and movable assets’ of the ‘Fondation’ and received a gift of £2 000 000 in recognition of a nation’s gratitude. The politicians still argued but the end was in sight. A speech from the throne by King Edward VII in 1908 represented the ultimate approval of the work of Morel and his colleagues. The King hoped that negotiations between Belgium and the Congo State would result in a State humanely administered in the spirit of the Berlin Act. The Belgian Parliament had to act if it was to retain any credence and self-respect, so the treaty became law in 1908. On 8 November 1908 the flag of the Congo Free State was lowered for the last time, but it took several more years for the Belgian Government to dismantle the ‘Leopold legacy’. It was 1913, the year in which the Congo Reform Association disbanded, that Britain recognised that the transfer of power was effective. By then Leopold had been dead for three and a half years, finally succumbing to an intestinal operation on 14 December 1909. Was it worth it and what was the cost? No one knows the answer to either question. Some figures have been produced, most comprehensively in terms of rubber production, by Morel, who, after his discoveries in the late 1890s which precipitated Leopold’s fall from grace, set out to establish realistic figures for


139 Congo rubber exports. The best one can say is that they represent minimum figures. From the earliest days of trading through the west coast settlements, small amounts of rubber had become available for export at the instigation of the traders. Unlike his Mesoamerican counterpart, the African native had little use for the material except as an adhesive to fasten spearheads and arrowheads to their shafts. By 1888 it was still a small amount, representing about 10% in value of all exports, rising to 25% by 1895, 50% in 1896, 70% in 1898, 85% in 1900, and peaking at 90% in 1901, but remaining in this area for the rest of Leopold’s ownership of the Congo. It has been estimated that, between 1898 and 1905, raw materials to the value of about £14 000 000 were exported from the Congo for the benefit of Leopold and his collaborators, whilst imports, mainly to support the ‘administrative’ regime, were some £6 000 000. In tonnage these figures represent an output of between 4500 to 6000 tons each year from 1900 to 1908. It was also estimated that Leopold’s ‘Domaine de la Couronne’ gave him a clear profit of some £3 000 000 between 1896 and 1906, whilst the State’s rubber exports in its peak year of 1901 were estimated to be some £2 000 000. These estimates were calculated on the ‘most realistic estimates’ of exports from a mass of data and not just on the ‘official’ documents of the time which first aroused Morel’s suspicions. They also exclude his profits from companies in which he had shares, usually over 50%. Morel estimated his income from dividends alone in the three major companies to be £360 000 in 1904–1905. In attempting to ridicule the figure of £3 000 000, the Belgian Premier, a known apologist for Leopold, produced figures to show that it was at least a factor of four too large. Unfortunately, his mathematical errors

Tears of the Tree 140 did not escape the Members of the Belgian Parliament, who felt that even the £3 000 000 was an underestimate. In calculating Leopold’s financial gains from the Congo, the various loans he raised between 1888 and 1904 should not be forgotten. The Belgian Premier suggested £3 000 000, whilst others, less in Leopold’s pocket, calculated over £5 000 000. By the time of Leopold’s death the money was rolling in nicely, and it has already been noted that the Belgian Government did not act with an excess of zeal to stop the slave trade when it took control at the end of 1909. The money was, after all, useful to balance the country’s books and complete Leopold’s lavish projects. In the four following years, 1909–1912, 14 000 tons of rubber were exported, but then came the Great War followed by plantation rubber. The rush for wild rubber was over. After Leopold’s death it took some years for the true size of his residual wealth to surface. Indeed, the complexity of his affairs makes it possible that there could still be a fortune or two, unclaimed and unidentified, gathering interest in bank accounts throughout Europe. Although his private will indicated a wealth of some £750 000, it did not take much sleuthing to discover ‘The Foundation of Niederfulbach’, established in Germany, which contained £4 000 000 in property and bonds which should have been handed over to the Belgian Government with the Congo. After a prolonged legal battle it was returned to the Belgians in 1913. The human cost of the Congo rubber saga is as difficult to calculate as the financial throughput, but it was certainly high. There is general agreement that the population of the Congo in the 1880s was around 25 000 000. In 1911 the official figure was put at 8 500 000, 7 700 000 in 1923, and 8 000 000–10 000 000 in the mid-1930s. Making due allowance for inaccuracies in the 1880s figure, there seems to be no reason to doubt that


141 10 000 000–15 000 000 natives ‘vanished’ in the Congo during Leopold’s rubber-grabbing years. Not all of this can be laid at the door of rubber or, indeed, at the door of Leopold himself, for during this period Africa was swept by a devastating plague of sleeping sickness. Villages vanished, as illustrated in a letter from a missionary to Casement who claimed that the population of Lukolela fell from 6000 to 352 in twelve years. Secret flight was an option, but this was against the concession company’s ‘law’ and it was not easy, as the death toll incurred by native porters during many explorations have shown. The birth rate of native Congolese fell substantially in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and this is generally ascribed to the falling numbers of young indigenous males, murdered for failing to meet their target quotas of rubber. However, the concurrent rape of the female hostages should have compensated for this, so the reasons must be more complex. One still has to ask whether this should be factored into any calculations regarding lives ‘lost’ during this period. The rubber tappers had to work between twenty and twentyfive days each month to pay their rubber taxes, and this left them with little time to clear land, build shacks, and grow food. Whichever came first, exhaustion or illness, and either would almost inevitably lead to the other, the result would be a drop in rubber collection and death. If half the missing millions died due to rubber-related causes, the figure would be close to the total population of Belgium and not dissimilar to the total number of dead in the Great War. If we take a not-unrealistic weight of rubber to come out of the Congo as 75 000 tons (75 000 000 kg) and the loss of native life as 7 500 000 then we have the value of a Congolese native life— 10 kg of rubber!

Tears of the Tree 142 Leopold did not know what riches were to be found in the Congo, although he appreciated that ivory was one. His sole ambition was to take control of some foreign land and strip it of its wealth by any means. The fact that the land was the Congo basin, that its major source of that wealth was rubber, and that its extraction cost millions of lives, was irrelevant.

8 Slaves to Rubber At the turn of the twentieth century the rubber plantation industry in Asia was getting off to a slow and shaky start (Ridley claimed that disruptive actions by Sir Frank Swettenham, the first Resident-General of the Federated Malay States, had set it back by at least ten years), whilst the African rubber industry was extremely small. Nevertheless, the industrialised countries, particularly America and Great Britain, were crying out for rubber and had to rely on the Amazonian basin to meet their demands. Statistics prior to about 1835 are difficult to find, but at that time the rubber exports from Para´ were as likely to be unvulcanised rubber overshoes as the raw material. The weight of the latter was less than one ton per week. A letter from Mr James Upton to Mr Seth Low of New York in March 1831 details how there are aboard the schooner Betsy & Eliza, en route to New York, one cask and five barrels of rubber totalling 537 lbs net weight which are to be sold ‘for the most you can obtain. I think the quality is very good’. In 1844–1845 the overshoe export market was over 400 000 pairs. By 1849–1850 it had fallen to just over 300 000, and by 1854–1855 it was too small to show in the statistics. The graph shown in Fig. 8.1 was prepared close to one hundred years ago and shows rubber (including the shoes) exported

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144 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 1836

1846

1856

1866

Fig. 8.1 Graph of rubber exports from Para´, 1836–1872.

through Para´ between 1836 and 1872; in the years 1872 it can be seen that there were about 8000 tons per year. By 1890 that figure had almost trebled to 20 000 tons and the demand was set to escalate to such an extent that these early years would not feature on world production plots through the twentieth century. This is clearly illustrated in the graph showing natural and synthetic rubber production throughout the twentieth century in Fig. 9.1. The obvious event which triggered this demand was the invention of the internal combustion engine, which took place at the same time that Wickham was bringing his seeds from South America and which led, in 1885, to the first motor car proper, manufactured by Daimler and Benz. In 1888 John Boyd Dunlop ‘reinvented’ the pneumatic tyre. The original pneumatic tyre had been patented by R. W. Thompson as early as 1845, but there was no interest in it—probably because the roads were inadequate and it seemed to offer no particular advantage over the solid ones. The Dunlop tyres had a particular shortcoming as they were stuck to

Slaves to Rubber

145 the wheel and thus access to the inner rubber tube in the common event of a puncture was tedious, but by the end of 1890 C. K. Welsh had patented the design of a wheel rim and outer cover with an inextensible lip. The fundamental design feature common to virtually all types of wheeled vehicles had arrived and would only be refined to the present day. The first motor vehicle specifically designed to use a pneumatic tyre took part in the Paris–Bordeaux–Paris race of 1895. Seven hundred and twenty miles (and twenty-two inner tubes) later the Daimler finished ninth in a field of forty-two. The ways in which rubber was ripped from the Amazon basin to meet this demand is the subject of this chapter. Like that of the Congo, it is not a pretty story! The development of the South American and Congo rubber production industries has one common thread—the deaths of millions of natives to meet the demand for rubber in the developing world between the first growth in its demand and the coming ‘on-stream’ of the plantations in the Far East. In other ways they differ. In the Congo the discovery of rubber was pure serendipity for Leopold II, but in South America the story was one of a substance which had been known about in the West for four hundred years suddenly being in ever-increasing demand. Rubber had initially been collected by individual tappers, but towards the end of the nineteenth century this changed to small cooperatives, often financed by trading companies. However, as soon as it was appreciated that vast amounts of money could be made, large companies run by the great, often murderous, ‘rubber barons’ moved in and took over, expanding their empires up the numerous tributaries and feeder rivers of the Amazon by (occasionally) buying out those in their way or (more often) by taking their trees and native workers by force.

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146 COLOMBIA

RI

Atlantic ocean

a can

RC

aqu

eta

R Putumayo

ali cay

OBIDOS MANAUS

RU

s

s

uru

RP

ajo

i

avar

RY

a

ier

ad

M

reg ori

o

R

500 miles

BRAZIL

RG

Madiera–Mamore railway

PERU R Beni

ga lla ua LIMA

PARA BOIM SANTAREM ap

IQUITOS on

RH

Pacific ocean

gro

R Amazon

R Maran

YURIMAGUAS RIOJA TARAPOTO

R Ne

R Japura

RT

ECUADOR

*

uru a

R Napo

RJ

QUITO

R Mamore

*

Marks the disputed border between Peru/Ecuador and Colombia Marks EI Encanto on the upper reaches of the Putumayo

Fig. 8.2 Sketch map of Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador showing the rubber rivers and towns.

Manoel Carioca controlled much of the rubber coming down the Grego´rio River—it would take a steamboat seven days to sail through his domain—whilst Luis de Silva Gomes had an estate on the Puru´s River which was estimated to be ten million acres in size. J. G. Arau´jo had half a million acres on the Negro. His expansion only stopped when he came up against another baron as powerful as himself, Germino Garrido y Otero, the ‘King of the Içana’ to the north-west of the Negro. Perhaps the biggest and most powerful of them all was Nicola´s Sua´rez, who ‘owned’ sixteen million acres around the most southerly of the great rubber rivers, the Beni. These barons, and dozens more like them, did not spend long periods of time in their jungle fiefdoms. The rubber gathering was overseen by their hand-picked enforcers, often criminals fleeing justice, who were usually paid on a commission-only basis, whilst their masters lived and worked in the more congenial atmosphere of the rapidly expanding cities, of which Manaus, located close to the confluence of the Amazon, Negro, and Puru´s Rivers, was the most important (see Fig. 8.3).

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147

Fig. 8.3 Rubber dealing in Manaus in the early twentieth century.

As with any group of people, the rubber barons were vastly different in character once the lust for money and the lack of morality in its making were discounted. The biggest spender was undoubtedly Waldemar Scholz, whose bacchanalian parties included ‘ladies’ bathing in iced champagne from which the male guests would replenish their glasses, whilst, at the other extreme, Arau´jo was a teetotaller and non-smoker whose preferred home was his office and who was responsible for the design and construction of much of Manaus. In many instances the detailed stories of these rubber barons and the ways in which they ran their great estates can only be guessed at. One example which was eventually brought to the notice of the consuming countries through the influence of the British Parliament was dubbed the ‘Putumayo affair’, and knowledge of

Tears of the Tree 148 the atrocities committed therein only came under public scrutiny in the UK because of two miscalculations by its overlord. The Putumayo is a major river in its own right, over one thousand miles long, which rises in the mountains on the west coast of Colombia and joins the Amazon in Brazil. It initially forms the border between Ecuador and Colombia and then, for much of its length, between Peru and Colombia. If it had risen a few miles further to the west it would have emptied quickly into the Pacific Ocean, these events might never have happened, and the story of the South American rubber boom might never have been fully told. It was in this region, in an area about the size of Belgium, that one Julio Ce´sar Arana built his rubber empire. Arana was born around 1864 in the Peruvian town of Rioja, where his father sold hats. His next-door neighbour was a girl a little younger than he, called Eleonora Zumaeta, on whom he was fixated and whom, he knew, he would never win as a shopkeeper. By the time he was fourteen he had left school and was established in his father’s business. In 1879 his father sent him to work as a secretary, where he learned business administration and bookkeeping, but by 1881 he had set out to discover the world beyond Rioja and hopefully to make his name and fortune—and win Eleonora. He set off down the Maranõn River and then followed the Amazon to Iquitos, Manaus, and finally Para´, where he discovered the important rubber traders. They all appeared to have money to burn—sometimes literally, as displays of ostentation such as lighting one’s cigar with a large denomination banknote would result in one’s neighbour immediately doing the same, but with a note of even more value. Selling hats to a gathering of such exhibitionists, where each would vie to pay the most, was child’s play! In 1884 Arana returned to Yurimaguas, a settlement near Rioja where Eleonora, now a qualified teacher, had opened the State’s

Slaves to Rubber

149 first school, to follow up his fevered written declarations of love with a personal approach, and by 1887 he had won her. During his travels he had become infected by the bites of many insects and animals, but the one he could not shake off was that of the rubber bug, and by 1889 he had established a rubbercollecting business with his brother-in-law, Pablo Zumaeta, in the small settlement of Tarapoto on the Huallaga River, which feeds into the Maranõn from the Peruvian Andes. Travelling the waterways, he put his business training to good account as he would trade anything for rubber and he always costed the rubber at the price prevailing at the time of the deal. This was usually out of date because of the rising market, but the traders, who may have seen no white man since his last visit, remained in ignorance of that. He then shipped to the US or Europe and sold in the markets there, where the prices were almost inevitably higher. This led to a massive profit on each shipment. But this was not enough. He wanted to cut out the ‘middle men’, so he bought his own rubber estate near Yurimaguas and recruited natives from Ceara´, on the eastern seaboard of Brazil, to work them. These natives were much stronger than the local Indians and could not escape as they were bound by debts to Arana for transport and basic supplies. These debts would never be cleared since they had to buy their supplies in his store at exorbitant prices. In any event, the punishment on recapture for trying to escape tended to be a painful death! By 1896 Arana had moved the centre of his operations downstream to Iquitos and was living in a ten-room house. He had built up international business connections and for eight years he prospered, although still not making the fortune he felt was his right. He believed his operation was too small, so he sold up and went looking for something bigger. Now luck and international politics came to his aid. In 1899 he had first explored the

Tears of the Tree 150 Putumayo River and had traded goods for the rubber collected by a few small isolated trail masters. None of the big rubber barons had found this river and, even if they had, they might not have wanted it as it was a war zone, with the governments of Colombia and Peru continually fighting over its possession. After years of argument they asked Pope Pius X to arbitrate and, at his suggestion, agreed that they would both declare a ‘demilitarised zone’ along the river. Arana moved and bought out nearly, but not quite, all the trail masters to control twelve thousand square miles of Putumayo territory. He was now frustratingly near realising his ambition of having the Putumayo known as ‘his’ river. All he had to do was to remove the few Colombians who were still tapping independently upstream and legitimise his claim to the land. The President of Peru was happy with the arrangement (Arana was of course Peruvian), but Arana needed more funds to cement his control of the region and decided that these could best be obtained by taking the company he had formed with his brother, Lizardo, Pablo Zumaeta, and Abel Alarco—J. C. Arana & Hermanos Company—public. The two largest rubber-consuming countries were the US and the UK, but the UK had one particular advantage; American ships did not journey up the Amazon beyond Para´, but the British operated a regular service between Liverpool and Manaus, and even sent smaller ships further upstream as far as Iquitos, past the junction of the Putumayo and Amazon Rivers. Britain it would have to be. Arana set to work on his prospectus whilst tightening his hold on the river. Although there was plenty of indigenous native labour to be had, they did not have leadership qualities and, like Leopold, Arana realised that supervisors who were in no way related to the workers could generally obtain the highest productivity as there were no tribal or personal loyalties to interfere with their loyalties to him.

Slaves to Rubber

151 His idea was to put in place a strong administrative layer of management, leave his brother-in-law to look after the day-to-day running of the business, and retire to Europe where he had already established his wife and children in a more congenial climate. He soon recruited his supervisors, including two hundred West Indians who were offered two-year contracts, and built up an armed ‘police force’ which had absolute control of all passage up and down the river. Arana had intended the recruitment of the West Indians to be an advantage in floating his company in the UK, but, as we shall see, it backfired with a vengeance. The illustrations in Fig. 8.4 show the public face of the rubber-collecting industry. The people are obviously not from the native tribes which traditionally supplied tappers to the large estates, whilst the ‘Seringueiros’ seem relatively prosperous and well equipped and are more likely to be ‘enforcers’ or family members of the landowners. Throughout 1907 Arana laboured to set up his company, and by early 1908 the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company was formed, capitalised at one million pounds and with seven hundred thousand £1 shares held by Arana and his family. Important British figureheads on the Board were Henry Read, manager of the London Bank of Mexico and South America, John Gubbins, a merchant with years of experience dealing with Peru (but knowing nothing of the rubber trade), and the mandatory titled director, Sir John Lister-Kaye, Bart. Unfortunately for Arana, the price of rubber was now falling and he was advised to postpone going public for a few months. He used this time constructively to rename the company the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC) (no ‘Rubber’) and to stress in the prospectus that its main assets were its trading businesses in Manaus and Iquitos. Land holdings around the Putumayo were a minor bonus!

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152 (a)

(b)

Fig. 8.4 The public face of rubber tapping: (a) Amazonian Seringueiros, and (b) tappers smoking rubber pelles.

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153 Just as Arana’s dream was coming to fulfilment, his nemesis was crossing the Peruvian Andes from the Pacific coast and discovering himself at the westernmost limit of the Putumayo. Nemesis here was named Walter Ernest Hardenburg, a twentyone-year-old engineer, born in Illinois, who had been working on a new railroad in Colombia, but who had always had a passion for the Amazon. For over a year he had heard nothing but stories of that river and its riches, so, when he discovered that a railroad was being built alongside the Madiera River, close to one thousand miles south of Manaus, which would bypass over two hundred miles of rapids-infested river to link up with the Mamore´ River and provide an easy route to deliver the Bolivian rubber of Sua´rez to the Amazon, he quit his job with the intention of travelling down the Amazon and up the Madiera to find work there. No one had told him that life expectancy for a worker on the construction site was three months! As he canoed down the Putumayo with a friend and colleague he met various Colombian rubber collectors who treated him well but warned of trouble ahead from Peruvian rubber men, who were slowly taking over the whole river. They claimed that Julio Ce´sar Arana was their leader and that his company was British! Keen to be on his way, Hardenburg put the remarks down to inter-country rivalry and left Remolino with a native Huitoto guide, who told him of the atrocities carried out by the Bolivian overseers—floggings, rape of the wives or daughters, and execution, usually after the amputation of some part of the anatomy and a period of agony—if one did not bring in one’s quota of rubber. One story was very reminiscent of the Congo, where here an overseer would blindfold young girls and use them for rifle practice as they ran about in front of his house. As yet these tales made little impact as the guide admitted that he had seen nothing of them himself but that every forest Indian knew of them.

Tears of the Tree 154 He added that his bosses, the Colombians, were good people and it was only the Peruvians who were bad. As Hardenburg travelled further down the river he began to have second thoughts, as he met people such as David Serrano, who had had his stock of rubber forcibly taken by Peruvian ‘soldiers’ employed by Arana and whose wife had been raped in front of him by the officer in charge, one of Arana’s ‘enforcers’, Miguel Loayza. It was not long afterwards that Hardenburg was taken prisoner on Arana’s ‘flagship’—the somewhat ironically named Liberal—and he heard first-hand of the massacre which had just taken place upstream, including the killing of his most recent befriender, Serrano. As a prisoner of Loayza at El Encanto, he saw for himself how the natives were treated, the tappers being starved, beaten, and left to die if they no longer had the strength to work. He saw young Indian girls working as domestic slaves during the day and either locked in a compound or used as sex slaves at night. Using various official-looking documents which he was carrying and realising Loayza’s lack of English, he was able to bluff Loayza into releasing him and sending him to Iquitos on the Liberal. It was five weeks since Hardenburg had started his journey down the Putumayo and his first priority was to alert Arana to the atrocities being carried out in his name, as he could not believe that the atrocities were being carried out with his prior knowledge. Unfortunately, Arana was away, so, being completely out of funds, Hardenburg took a part-time job teaching English. He stayed with an American dentist, Guy King, who seemed to be aware of the stories about Arana and his ‘enforcers’ but preferred to turn a blind eye to them. Although Acting Consul, he did not see how it could be America’s problem. One day Hardenburg heard sounds of a commotion across the road and saw the police raiding the offices of a local newspaper run by Benjamin Saldanã

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155 Rocca, who, he was soon to discover, had tried to rouse the populous by publishing stories given to him by ex-employees of Arana. Hardenburg tried to obtain some of the publications, but to no avail. At last Arana returned to Iquitos and granted Hardenburg an audience, but from Hardenburg’s point of view it was unsatisfactory. Arana told him that he had only visited the Putumayo region a few times in his life and that his soldiers were there to protect his interests against marauding Colombians. Arana added that he would soon be visiting the region again and there the discussion ended. Soon after this meeting he was approached by a young native who claimed to be the son of Rocca, who by that time had fled to Lima in fear of his life, and the native had all of Rocca’s original testimonials from the enslaved natives of the Putumayo. As Hardenburg read them he realised that all he had heard, and more, was true and that Arana was knowingly running his ‘empire’ along lines which, if he had known it, exactly paralleled those in the Congo. Even the tales of mutilation, rape, and decapitation were interchangeable. From that point on, in his writings on the subject Hardenburg referred to Arana’s company as the ‘civilising company’ (his italics)! However, few of the documents were notarised, so Hardenburg set out to find any ex-employees or slaves of Arana who would talk to him directly and whom, he hoped, he would be able to persuade to provide sworn affidavits. Here he was initially unlucky but, as his reputation as ‘a man who was about to do something’ spread, he managed to meet a number of witnesses who would talk freely to him and this gave him the answer to his one big question— why would the overseers act so cruelly; surely they could not all be that sadistic? It was a simple answer: they were only paid commission. At last, with eighteen sworn depositions, he decided it was time to let the British people know what a British company was up

Tears of the Tree 156 to in the jungles of South America. He set sail for London in July 1909 with his mass of documentary evidence that Britain, the world leaders in anti-slavery legislation in the nineteeth century, was home to a company still practising all the most terrible of activities associated with slavery in the new twentieth century. He had first thought of approaching the British directors of the PAC, but then he decided that it would be safer to get his story published. Unfortunately, no paper would touch him for fear of a libel action and, as his frustrations grew, he was only persuaded to continue by his new-found friend, Mary Feeney. Almost at the end of his patience, he was introduced to the Revered John H. Harris of the Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection Society who had just finished his decade-long campaign against Leopold and the Congo rubber trade. Harris in turn introduced Hardenburg to Sydney Paternoster of the newspaper Truth, who was able to confirm enough of Rocca’s story to begin the crusade in his paper. His allegations included rape, torture, and murder of the natives, and emphasised that the PAC was a British company. The uproar the articles caused could not be ignored by the Government, but it was unsure how to tackle the problem. Then Arana’s second mistake came to light (his first was to make the company a British one). He had recruited British subjects (West Indians) and, if these were being treated as slaves or held against their wishes, then Britain had every right to intervene. The matter was now out of the hands of Hardenburg who, by March 1910, had arrived in Canada to start a new life with his wife, Mary (neé Feeney). In May of that year the Foreign Office asked Roger Casement, who, as we have seen in the previous chapter, had been involved in exposing the Congo horrors, to investigate. He travelled throughout the Putumayo region and reported that the fundamentals of Rocca’s and Hardenburg’s allegations were based on

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157 fact. He demanded that the law should take its course and, in order to prevent a Government cover-up, as he had experienced with his reports from the Congo, he copied his report to the Antislavery and Aborigines Protection Society. (This was probably sensible as it took until 1912 for the UK Government to actually publish it.) One year after he had set out, in May 1911, each director of the PAC received a personal copy of Casement’s report from the Foreign Office and it was confirmed in the House of Commons that the allegations were true. Just as they finished reading the report the directors got another shock when Arana’s brother-in-law, Pablo Zumaeta, notified them that, acting with his sister’s (Eleonora’s) power of attorney, he had mortgaged the Putumayo estates for sixty thousand pounds to pay off the company’s debts to her—debts the directors did not realise existed due to their imperfect understanding of the company books! A few months later, in the autumn of 1911, the company was wound up with, amazingly, Arana elected as liquidator to resolve the position as best he could. At this stage it should be pointed out that other voices were being raised against Arana. The governments of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru were all concerned with the tales coming out of the Putumayo, but nationalism and politics were used by each to manipulate the truth to its own advantage. Colombia and Ecuador used the stories to take the moral high ground and to reinforce their territorial claims on the area, whilst Arana roused all patriotic Peruvians to help him, blaming soldiers from the other two countries for the atrocities. As Arana was Peruvian, the Peruvian Government was in an embarrassing position, although it had been quietly investigating Arana’s activities for some time. Finally, spurred on by articles in the ‘serious’ press, it directed Judge Carlos Valcaćel to investigate. This appointment

Tears of the Tree 158 fell through and it was left to Judge Ro´mulo Paredos to set off and initiate Peru’s formal investigation in early 1911. Four months later he returned with his evidence which, when documented, came to 1242 pages and confirmed all that had been said about the horrors of the Putumayo. Valcaćel supported Paredos and issued over 200 arrest warrants, but the pro-Arana camp was so powerful and vociferous that he quickly realised that his life was in danger and fled the country. The courts cancelled the warrants. Arana’s argument was simplistic and appealing. The PAC was a strong and civilising force in the wilds of the jungle and he was promoting Peru’s national interests and international position; to say otherwise was simply unpatriotic. Within the country this argument could appeal to a compliant Government, but Peru was now facing a rising tide of anger in the UK and, perhaps more importantly, by 1912 the quantity of clean Asian plantation rubber coming onto the market was virtually equivalent to the less-clean wild material, and this was starting to threaten the world market for Amazonian rubber. The writing was on the wall for the whole Amazonian economy. America was sitting on the fence for fear of upsetting its South American neighbours, whilst Brazil was keeping a very low profile as it was well aware that the ‘Putumayo affair’ was not unique but fairly typical of rubber collecting throughout the Amazon and related river basins. The eventual publication of (now Sir Roger) Casement’s report in 1912 by the UK Government contained figures which could no longer be ignored. Casement calculated that at least 30 000 natives had been directly murdered or killed by deliberate starvation brought about by crop destruction for a gain of 4000 tons of rubber in the Putumayo region alone in the first twelve years of the century.

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159 On 5 November 1912 UK Government agents arrived at the PAC’s offices to impound all the company records, and the next day a parliamentary committee began its investigations into the affair. Charles Roberts MP was in the chair. Casement produced both documentary evidence, and photographs, of the atrocities he had seen (see Fig. 8.5). He then delivered to the badly shaken committee a range of trade goods, listing their real values and the prices charged to the tappers by Arana’s company enforcers or trail bosses. It was then the turn of the PAC. First to be called was the company accountant, Henry Gielgud, who had been sent to South America by his employer, a London firm of accountants, to reorganise the books of the PAC. On his return he was asked to report on the treatment of the natives and had assured the directors that they were well treated and happy, but before the committee his answers were rather less

Fig. 8.5 The not-so-public face of the rubber industry: an Indian woman condemned to death by starvation on the upper Putumayo.

Tears of the Tree 160 forthcoming. He prevaricated and blustered, claimed that as an accountant it was not his responsibility to investigate the workers’ conditions, and that his very trip had been devised and orchestrated to provide cover for the PAC. One question which he was unable to answer in his role as accountant was why the company should spend seven thousand pounds on rifles, each costing just over two pounds according to Casement. His suggestion that the tappers might buy them to protect themselves against jaguars was treated with derision since Casement had also pointed out that it would have taken a tapper’s total income for two years to buy one (remember the ‘public face’ illustration in Fig. 8.4). The committee then moved on to the directors and began with the ex-chairman, John Gubbins. Although he had had a career in South America, it had been in the sugar trade in Peru and he, like all the British directors, had never visited the Putumayo. He excused himself from knowledge of the atrocities by claiming that he had read nothing of the background of the company before accepting his directorship and had read nothing about anything to do with its business since. In one outburst in his defence he claimed that the subjection of Indians by commercial companies was the condition prevailing in the whole of the Amazon valley. This did his claim of ignorance little good. He finally admitted that he did accept the evidence and there had obviously been atrocities but, not only was the British board unaware of them, so was Arana, and he would come before the committee and say so. It was doubtful if Arana, at that time at home in Manaus, expected any such outburst from Gubbins, but he was left with no choice if he was to salvage anything out of his rapidly crumbling empire. In the meantime the situation continued to deteriorate for Arana. The mandatory titled figurehead on the board, Sir John Lister-Kaye, confessed to speaking no Spanish whilst agreeing that all board meetings were held in that language. The banker, Henry

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161 Read, was just as ignorant of life in the Putumayo as anyone. He could speak Spanish but claimed that vast numbers of documents and letters were never tabled at board meetings, being dealt with privately by Arana, and that he relied on Arana to provide any information he wanted. He was, after all, a banker looking after his bank’s interests and knew nothing about rubber. Finally, in March 1913 Arana arrived back in England—just in time to hear his company being wound up and to find that he had been stripped of his position as liquidator. Possibly he was able to read Hardenburg’s book—The Putumayo, the Devil’s paradise— which not only told his story but included seventy-three pages abstracted from Casement’s report, and which was published in December 1912. Arana’s defence was three-pronged: nobody had told him what was going on, he had not witnessed anything himself, and his accusers were all of bad character and unreliable. He had to accept Casement’s evidence but, as he had already said, he knew nothing of the atrocities himself. He was then questioned about Hardenburg’s documents and reports. He had already, even before Hardenburg left Para´, set in train a sequence of events which would enable him to call Hardenburg a liar and forger, but this had backfired and he was now called to explain what had happened in detail and under oath. Eventually, he drew back and withdrew all his direct allegations against Hardenburg, yet refused to unambiguously clear him. At that point Hardenburg himself was called. Arana had no idea he was even in the country and sat still as he told his story. Again Arana tried to destroy him by labelling him a forger, but the committee had seen enough to ignore this and returned to press Arana further, who was now claiming that all who had given evidence or testimonies against him were liars and blackmailers who had turned against him because he would not give in to their

Tears of the Tree 162 demands. In the end the committee accepted all the evidence against Arana, including his attempts to destroy the reputations of Hardenburg and others whom he saw as potential troublemakers. The committee’s report showed its opinion of Arana, accusing him of ‘callous indifference and guilty knowledge’, whilst it accused the board members of ‘negligent ignorance’ and ‘deserving of severe censure’. It further concluded that the Putumayo affair was only one shockingly bad instance of conditions liable to be found over a wide area of South America. However, the British courts were unable to try Arana for any specific crime, so he returned to Peru where he continued his rubber business. Britain tried to persuade Peru, Brazil, and the US to close him down, but to no avail. The run-up to the First World War was generating a sustained demand for all the world’s rubber, including whatever could be obtained from the Amazon, and the PAC survived until 1920. In 1921 Arana was granted rights to land along the Putumayo and Caqueta´ Rivers by the Peruvian Government, but a later treaty defined the Putumayo as the border between Peru and Colombia and cost Arana 60% of his holding—for which he received two million pounds sterling in compensation! In 1932 Arana, together with his son and daughter, were involved with a ‘patriotic junta’ which attempted to reclaim what he saw as his land, and this precipitated a full-scale but brief war between the two countries, stopped under pressure from the US. The losers were, as always, the Indians and, this time, Arana himself who finally lost the lands he was fighting to regain. The time had come to retire. He was, after all, now sixty-nine, but it was some twenty years before the end of Julio Ce´sar Arana. He died in 1952. Compared with King Leopold and the Congo, Arana’s reign of terror was on a very small scale but, pro rata, it is comparable.

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163

Fig. 8.6 J. C. Arana in 1925 as senator from Loreto.

For over a decade he stripped what rubber he could from the Putumayo and the scale of his atrocities can be deduced from the fact that the contribution of the Putumayo to the world’s rubber supply over this period was some 4000 tons—and, according to Sir Roger Casement, the lives of at least 30 000 Indians, that is, four million kilos of rubber for about two million kilos of natives. The British Parliament concluded that this was only one shockingly bad instance of what was probably happening over much of the rubber-producing area of South America!

9 Competition! Although this book tells the story of natural rubber, it would be unrealistic to say nothing of the birth and rise of some of the synthetic materials which have properties broadly similar to those of the natural material, i.e. materials which are ‘elastomeric’. Indeed, these synthetic elastomers are essential to the world in which we live today. So what do we mean by saying something is ‘elastic’ or that it has ‘elastic properties’ (i.e. it is an elastomer)? The basic criterion which all readers will recognise is that it must be capable of undergoing large extensions or deformations and that these must be essentially reversible. For example, a rubber ball will bounce as it returns to its spherical shape from the deformed one it adopts as it hits a surface, whilst a simple elastic band can be stretched up to ten or more times its original length and then revert to its original size when the stretching force is removed. Elastomers have some unusual physical properties and these exclude them from the normal definition of a solid. In fact, the reversible deformability is more reminiscent of a gas and the term ‘elastic’was first used by Robert Boyle in the middle of the seventeenth century to describe the properties of a gas. Charles Marie de la Condamine used the French equivalent, ‘elasticite´’, one hundred years later when he was describing the dried sap he had found in South America.

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165 The facts relating to the reversible deformation of elastomers have therefore been known since the earliest days of Western interest in natural rubber, but the whys remained a mystery. Some of the anomalous properties of an elastomer are known to all schoolchildren, although they may just be accepted without an appreciation of their unusualness. If an elastic band is stretched and quickly placed on the upper lip, an area of extreme sensitivity to temperature changes, it will feel warm or even hot. If it is held stretched until it cools and then allowed to relax then, it will feel cool. A related experiment will prove that, if the band is subjected to some light force so that it is stretched and it is then warmed, it will shrink rather than stretch further as might be intuitively thought. This observation was first noted by Gough in 1805 and investigated further by Joule in the 1850s, when it became known as the Gough–Joule effect. However, it was to be almost 100 years later before the spatial structure of natural rubber was determined and a satisfactory explanation proposed. This is no place to detail the thermodynamics and mathematics of rubber elasticity, but a simple explanation is offered. In 1920 Staudinger proposed the idea that elastomers consisted of long chains of linked smaller units; in 1925 Katz discovered that crystal structure could be seen with X-rays, and in the early 1930s Meyer, von Susich, and Valco recognised that elastomer chains had a statistically random spatial configuration and that they would also have a random thermal motion. By 1932 Busse had documented the conditions required for ‘rubber-like elasticity’. The chemistry of vulcanisation will be discussed later, but, if we imagine the polymer chain as a chain of individual links with some ‘springiness’ in each link, it can be considered here as the tying together of occasional links of different chains, where they happen to overlap, to give a three-dimensional network. Within this the chains are in constant thermal motion (Brownian motion) during

Tears of the Tree 166 which they are able to twist and flex within the strictures of the network. The anomalous effects can now be explained. As the rubber band is stretched the chains become more orientated and closer together, so there is less opportunity for movement. They must therefore lose energy and this is dissipated as heat. On releasing the tension the chains have more space to move in and absorb heat to provide more thermal energy. The band will therefore become cold. Using a similar argument it will be seen that, if a stretched rubber band is heated, more thermal energy will be available and so the chains will undergo more thermal movement. Because the chain lengths between crosslinks are fixed, this will bring the fixed points (the crosslink sites) closer together, and thus the overall stretched length will decrease. Now we know what an elastomer is, we can look at how and why the synthetic rubber industry developed to compete with the natural material. The graphs in Fig. 9.1 show the development of natural and synthetic rubber production throughout the twentieth century and indicate that today around 60% of the world’s elastomers are synthetic. Two features are of particular historical interest. The first is the scale on the left of the main graph, which should be compared with that of the graph of the export of Para´ rubber during the nineteenth century in Fig. 8.1. Plotted on the same scale, Fig. 8.1 would run from 0 to 7 and be totally invisible. The second is the ‘blip’ between 1940–1945 due to the loss of plantation rubber from the Far East during the Second World War. Natural rubber output continued to grow at a steady pace throughout the twentieth century, but demand far outstripped supply and this enabled the synthetic materials to find a market. Of the wide range of materials we shall consider in this chapter there are two, butadiene rubber (BR) and styrene butadiene

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167

16 000 120

Thousands of tons

10 000

Natural %

12 000

80 60 40 20

8000 6000 4000

Total

100

14 000

Synthetics

0 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 Year

Natural

2000 0 1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67 70 73 76 79 82 85 88 91 94 97 Year

Fig. 9.1 Graph of natural and synthetic rubber production 1900–1997, and natural rubber production as a percentage of the total elastomers produced worldwide.

rubber (SBR), which are general-purpose rubbers which can replace the natural material in many applications, although the last still has certain properties which make it the material of choice in certain circumstances. One area in which all of these three elastomers show poor properties is resistance to swelling in hydrocarbon oils, and here two other synthetics come into their own, polychloroprene (CR) and nitrile rubbers (NBR). The growth of the synthetic rubber industry begs the primary question: If rubber had not existed would man have invented it? He certainly would not have set out to because, without its being there, the concept that a material could have been made with such peculiar properties would have been unlikely to have occurred to him. Some elastic materials would probably have come to light by serendipity, since chemists have always enjoyed mixing chemicals together to see what results, but it is doubtful if, without the spur that such a material did exist, this would have occurred until well

Tears of the Tree 168 into the twentieth century. What a difference that would have made! It will also be seen later in this chapter that the vast majority of the modern synthetic plastics industry developed as an offshoot of man’s attempts to make elastic materials. The story of natural rubber is one which developed over a period of time and if one were to highlight some specific people who were responsible for the great steps forward one might think of la Condamine/Fresneau, Goodyear/Hancock, and Wickham/ Ridley. The story of the synthetics is somewhat different as it was first necessary to establish some chemical understanding of the natural material before leaping into the great unknown. Unfortunately for the non-scientific reader, this requires some chemistry. It was obvious to all Victorian scientists that man could improve on nature, and as early as 1860 Williams thermally decomposed rubber and identified ‘spirit’, ‘oil’, and ‘tar’—the spirit, or volatile substance, he named ‘isoprene’ and correctly gave its elemental composition as C5H8. In 1879 Bouchardat recombined isoprene to a rubbery material and Tilden wrote in 1884 of its possible industrial significance (if it could be synthesised cheaply enough—one of life’s perpetual problems for any chemist!). In 1900 Kondakoff polymerised 2,3-dimethylbutadiene to obtain ‘methyl rubber’ and this became the first commercial rubber when it was produced by Bayer in 1909. Interestingly, Tilden had carried out this reaction some twenty years earlier, but possibly by accident or mistake as he never recorded it and his material was only identified recently. In 1912 a few car tyres were made of this elastomer and one set went to Kaiser Wilhelm II. At least one of these is still in existence and was displayed at an exhibition of the history of rubber which toured Europe during 1995–1996. It had oxidised to such an extent that its tread surface was rock hard!

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169 However, it was still not a commercially viable material so Germany obtained most of its natural rubber from the US. This obviously ended when the States entered the Great War in 1916 and German production of methyl rubber was recommenced with some 2500 tons being manufactured by the war’s end. Russia was also active during this period, polymerising many monomers including 1,4-butadiene in 1910 to give butadiene rubber (BR). However, neither the Russian nor the American synthetic rubber industries were under the same pressures as Germany and, with the price of natural rubber low, there was little incentive for anything other than academic research. Although the words ‘polymerise’ and ‘polymerising’ have been used earlier in the chapter, the scientists who had carried out these reactions had no chemical understanding of what they had achieved, and it was only in 1920 that the German chemist, Hermann Staudinger, suggested that they had made molecules of very high molecular weight by chemically combining thousands of repeat units of simple molecules or monomers. He called these long chains ‘polymers’ and later the word ‘elastomer’ was adopted to identify those specifically with elastic properties and so differentiate them from the non-elastic polymers—plastics. The situation regarding research changed drastically in 1922 when the Stephenson Reduction Plan was introduced. This was designed to cut production from the British-controlled plantations and so force up the low price of natural rubber. Over the next three years there was a tenfold price rise—followed by an equally rapid and catastrophic fall as producers outside the control of Britain flooded the market. It was this political intervention in the free market which triggered the next phase in the development of the synthetics. One of the first of the new materials was far removed from the work of the preceding years in that it was prepared, by accident,

Tears of the Tree 170 by Dr Joseph Patrick whilst he was trying to develop a new antifreeze for cars in the early 1920s (although he did not patent the discovery until 1932). Could this be the serendipity mentioned earlier? The substance was an ethylene polysulphide— the first of the ‘Thiokols’ which are still in use as sealants today. Working independently in Switzerland, Baer produced a similar material in 1926 on which IG Farbenindustrie based its ‘Perdurens’, whilst in the States the thiokol rubbers were referred to as GR-P (GR denotes government rubber). It was in 1926 that Waldo Semon synthesised a substance known worldwide today by just three letters—‘PVC’. In actual fact, this is not an elastomer and had been synthesised towards the end of the nineteenth century, but Semon discovered that it could absorb large amounts of certain liquids and the resulting material had, to some degree, elastic properties. Because of this, his later discoveries, and his fascinating life, he merits a special place in the history of synthetic elastomers. Waldo Lonsbury Semon was born in 1898 into a family which had seen its share of American history. His father was an engineer, involved in construction projects throughout the country, whilst two of his uncles had been involved in building the Great Northern Railroad. His grandfather fought both in the American Civil War and against the Sioux with General Custer, whilst his father, Semon’s great-grandfather, had crossed the country from east to west at the time of the Californian gold rush. In contrast, the maternal side of his family had a literary bent and Waldo’s genes seemed to represent a perfect fusion of these two sides of his family. His father travelled extensively, working on numerous engineering projects (Waldo claimed that he had ‘itchy feet’), which resulted in him living in a different place for almost each year of his school life. However, he was fascinated by books and

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171 learned to read and write before he entered school in 1904. His early reading seemed to be shared between his father’s engineering textbooks and his mother’s Shakespeare! His fascination with applied science soon led to experimentation. He built a battery and electric buzzer at the age of nine, and then tried to recharge dead batteries from the live rail of the local electric railway. Surprisingly, and to our advantage, he survived. Fortunately, this failed to dampen his investigative spirit and soon he and two friends cast their own cannons, which they charged with black powder to fire wooden missiles. To show that chemistry was also an interest at that early age, he attempted to dye his aunt’s (white) cat black with silver nitrate. The resulting red, black, and white tricoloured cat was, perhaps, his first intimation that practical and theoretical chemistry often follow divergent paths! His first part-time job, aged eleven, did not suggest a career in science. It was with Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, where his pay was being taught to shoot by Buffalo Bill himself. His next summer job was with an electrical company. Not surprisingly, electricity and radio transmission became his new passion. Moving to Ashland, he set up his first laboratory above the stables of the new family home, but his father was soon on the move again to Oregon where, here at least, he achieved two consecutive years of education before being uprooted yet again. In spite of all these travels, his avid reading and experimentation gave him an academic knowledge well in advance of most of his classmates, but, now eighteen years old, he still had no career in mind. Enlightenment came when the National Bureau of Standards refused him a research position because he had no degree. Mr Miller (a co-founder of Boeing) offered him an immediate position, but pointed out that, ultimately, paper qualifications mattered and he should get himself some.

Tears of the Tree 172 He decided to enrol at the University of Washington where a degree in engineering should have been his obvious choice, but, perhaps because of his father’s wandering lifestyle and a reluctance to continue this for the rest of his life, he chose chemistry as his main subject. Unfortunately, his family was soon off again, so he had to organise accommodation and the means to pay for it. This he did by working evenings and Sundays as a janitor in the University. It was during his first term at university that he met Marjorie Gunn, who was also studying chemistry and would, eventually, become his wife. Perhaps because of his upbringing, Semon had always been interested in the appliance of knowledge to practical problems and this led him to switch from pure chemistry to chemical engineering, where he was soon recognised by his peers as a brilliant experimentalist. By now it was 1918 and the US army took him from his studies, quickly realised his abilities, and set him to work at the University on army projects. Developing a new manufacturing process for TNT must have taken him straight back to his childhood! He finally graduated in 1920 and he and Marjorie were married in September of that year. He then began working for a postgraduate degree, funded by some teaching, whilst his wife tutored students at the University. At the end of this first year, when the colleges closed, their combined incomes fell to zero. Semon obtained a job in a factory which generated gas from oil and coke but which wanted to switch to using local coal. By the end of the summer he had succeeded, but the cost of the plant conversion proved too high for the process to be viable. On the ‘plus’ side, the University heard of his success and offered him a position as Assistant Chemistry Instructor. He was now reasonably settled, with a number of research projects and a plot of land near Seattle where

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173 he was building a house. More stability was provided by the birth of two daughters, Mary and Marjorie, in 1922 and 1924. A third, Constance Anne, was to follow in 1929. However, good fortune did not last, and in 1925 funding changes at the University put an end to his external contracts and forced him to look for a more lucrative position. At about that time B. F. Goodrich of Akron, Ohio, a company known worldwide for its rubber products and, in particular, automotive tyres, was starting to think of developing a synthetic rubber to replace the natural material sourced from the far side of the world. The man in charge of chemical research at Goodrich was Dr Trumbull, who had been Semon’s Professor of Chemistry in his first year at university, and, remembering the abilities of his young student, he offered him the job of inventing this material. Semon accepted and decided to drive to Akron with his family rather than go by train. His interest in developing an improved automotive tyre grew rapidly as he experienced fourteen punctures over the two-week journey! His first project was to synthesise a material which could replace natural rubber as a tank-lining material and which could be stuck to the metal tank (or tubes) with Goodrich’s existing rubber-to-metal adhesive (Vulcalok). He studied what little was known about synthetic polymers and decided to investigate the field of vinyl polymers. These were not new but, as understood, were commercially valueless. The year was 1926 and within a few months he had made polyvinyl chloride (PVC)—a hard white powder which, as already said, Semon found would swell to a gel which was mouldable and had certain rubber-like properties, its hardness and ‘rubberiness’ depending on the amount of solvent present. Unfortunately, he could not bond it to metal—which had been the purpose of the research—but Goodrich got some early return

Tears of the Tree 174 for its investment by way of PVC shoe heels and coated chemical racks. This was not sufficient to provide the company with the funds it needed to keep on developing the material, and it was on the point of backing out when Semon came up with the idea of coating fabrics to give waterproof materials and of producing soft flexible PVC sheets for applications such as shower curtains. The company Vice-President whom he had to convince was a keen camper who was used to being soaked inside his so-called ‘waterproof tent’. Not surprisingly, Semon was able to get his approval and in 1931 a range of products came to the market. The name ‘Koroseal’ was proposed for PVC by Goodrich’s Director of Research and soon became the registered trademark. Semon was granted the US Patent for PVC in 1933, No. 1929453. In speeding through his life, much has been omitted, so it should be said here that this was actually Semon’s 22nd US Patent, the others including amine antioxidants, the adhesive ‘Plasticon’ based on scrap rubber, as well as bookbinding using adhesives instead of stitching and chewing gum. With the success of PVC behind him, Semon returned to his search for a synthetic elastomer to replace natural rubber in automotive tyres. The rise of Hitler and the possibility of the US being isolated from its sources of the natural material concentrated Semon’s, Goodrich’s, and the US Government’s minds, individually and collectively. He was aware of the joint work of IG (which now included Bayer) and Standard Oil in the US into synthetic elastomers, and this was resumed in 1925 as the price of natural rubber soared in response to the Stephenson Plan. They soon managed to synthesise polybutadiene rubber, which was called ‘Buna’, as well as two copolymers synthesised by mixing two different monomers together before the polymerisation stage—‘Buna S’ (styrene butadiene rubber, SBR or GR-S in America) and ‘Buna N’ (butadiene acrylonitrile rubber,

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175 NBR or GR-A). These had reached laboratory production by 1930 but were not industrially developed when reaction to the Stephenson Plan made the price of natural rubber head for the floor again. Semon decided that the polymerisation of butadiene offered the most likely route to a viable synthetic elastomer, but the practical difficulties in obtaining a high polymer were formidable, and it was only in 1939 with solution polymerisation, rather than gas-phase polymerisation, that he got the breakthrough he needed to synthesise a useful material. This, blended with natural rubber, was quickly used to manufacture some automotive tyres and surpassed all expectations with practically determined life expectancies of over 50 000 miles. Goodrich christened his polybutadiene ‘Ameripol’, whilst the tyres, launched in June 1940, were named ‘Liberty Tyres’. Whether this referred to a freedom from Eastern sources of natural rubber or was prescient of their importance over the next five years is not reported. Throughout this period all the work in the US was privately funded and when the Second World War started there were only minimal synthesising facilities. Production only rose from 2000 tons in 1939 to 10 000 tons in 1941. In that year Goodrich agreed to make available its confidential process to its competitors so that the US could increase output in anticipation of its contribution to the anti-Nazi war effort. Semon was appointed Chairman of the Technical Committee which had been set up to coordinate the synthesis of Ameripol and the manufacture of tyres from it, whilst the Government paid for the plant to be built. In today’s money this investment would have been around 3 billion pounds. The first of these came on-stream in mid-1942 and by 1945 the year’s production exceeded 830 000 tons. Over this same early period Germany’s production went from 22 000 tons to a peak of about 100 000 tons in the middle years of the war, and

Tears of the Tree 176 then, not surprisingly, fell to zero in 1945. Directly out of this extended research came commercially viable GR-S or SBR (styrene butadiene rubber), and these two synthetic elastomers remain today the general-purpose rubbers of choice to replace or blend with the natural material. There was one further valuable material to come out of the prewar IG/Standard agreement and that was butyl rubber (IIR). Its precursor was synthesised by IG as polyisobutylene (IM) and had no olefinic groups, so it could not be vulcanised. Standard added a few per cent of butadiene or isoprene to give a low level of residual unsaturation and thus a vulcanisable elastomer—butyl rubber. In 1943 Semon was made Director of Pioneering Research at Goodrich, but he could not get away from PVC which was now being used to manufacture many dozens, if not hundreds, of products ranging from hosepipes to electric plugs and plastic toys of every description. The age of tinplate was at an end. PVC resin was marketed under the trade name ‘Geon’, although it was known worldwide just as ‘vinyl’. In 1993 that part of Goodrich concerned with PVC was spun off as the independent Geon Corporation, and in 2000 Geon merged with M. A. Hannah Co. to form the PolyOne Corp. Waldo Semon continued to work for Goodrich until his Sixty-fifth birthday in 1963, when he ‘retired’ and took a teaching post at Kent State University but by 1971 his eyesight was failing rapidly and he had to resign. Even then he was in considerable demand as a consultant and expert witness, whilst, in his spare time, he worked his vegetable garden. In his eighties he was still teaching informally at local schools, where he believed in the ‘catch them young’ philosophy of inspiring children with enthusiasm for investigative science. In 1979 Marjorie died. Waldo survived her for some twenty years, passing away on 26 May 1999, halfway through his one-hundredth year.

Competition!

177 In following the life and research activities of Semon it has been necessary to skip the inter-war discovery of one of the other great synthetic elastomers, polychloroprene (CR). This was due to the pioneering work of Wallace Carothers whilst he was working at DuPont. In fact, there is a double credit in the history of polymers due to this pairing since, not only did Carothers’ team at DuPont develop the first commercial synthetic elastomer, which is still technically important today, but also, a few years later, he was responsible for the discovery of arguably one of the greatest families of plastics ever commercialised. In view of his position as the second of the two great names in the field of synthetic elastomers, we shall look briefly at his life. He was born on 27 April 1896, the eldest of four children, in Burlington, Ohio. He was considered ‘bookish’ at school, but that was to underestimate his breadth of interests. As well as devouring every book he could find, he was fascinated by mechanical toys and he also loved music. His tastes were catholic, ranging from Bach to Gilbert and Sullivan. In high school his interests turned to chemistry and he built a laboratory in his bedroom. His father taught at Capital City Commercial College in Des Moines and it was there that Carothers went to study accountancy when he left school. He then moved to Tarkio College in Missouri to study chemistry, although, being short of funds, he used his accountancy knowledge to advantage by teaching it in his spare time. He must have been a remarkable student—possibly unique—because he was made head of the chemistry department whilst still an undergraduate. He graduated in 1920, obtained his Masters in 1921, and his Doctorate from the University of Illinois in 1924. He was then appointed a professor at Harvard where he began his serious research career into high polymers.

Tears of the Tree 178 It was during his time in Illinois that the tormented side of Carothers’ character surfaced; he filled a phial with cyanide, to be carried with him for the rest of his life as an escape route if his fits of depression became too much to bear. In 1928 DuPont broke new ground by setting aside a laboratory for pure research. The ‘blue skies’ approach was not unusual fifty years later, but at that time corporate research was very much ‘cash flow oriented’—as indeed it has become again more recently. The chance to forgo teaching and devote all his time to research was not to be missed and, at thirty-two, he was placed in charge of DuPont’s research division. It was known that he suffered from moods of deep depression and his staff was warned to look out for them, but his mentor, Roger Adams, believed that these could be controlled and that Carothers had much to give the world from his researches. He proved to be just half right. Dupont was aware of the work of Father Julius Nieuwland into the synthesis of chloroprene from acetylene via divinyl acetylene, and believed that this could be the precursor of a viable synthetic elastomer. (Natural rubber consists of monomers which have four carbon atoms joined in a line, with carbons two and three unsaturated in the cis configuration and with a methyl group attached to the second carbon atom; chloroprene has a molecular structure which can be described as exactly similar but with the branched methyl group replaced by a chlorine atom.) This became Carothers’ first project and in April 1930 the polymer was synthesised by one of his team, Arnold Collins. This had the anticipated ‘rubbery’ properties and, whilst these were somewhat poorer than those exhibited by natural rubber in many areas, it had a much greater oil resistance. This gave it a niche market and it went into production in 1931 as ‘Neoprene’, the first commercially successful synthetic polymer which is still in production today. The chemical name for the elastomer is polychloroprene,

Competition!

179 Neoprene being DuPont’s trade name, but, like Hoover, the word has now been accepted as generic. They even made some tyres from it in 1934. It should be recorded that Father Nieuwland was offered royalties by DuPont for his part in the discovery, but he refused since he was under a vow of poverty. With that problem quickly resolved (three years from the start of research to commercial production!), Carothers’ group turned its attention to synthetic fibres, specifically to find a replacement for silk, which was in short supply because of trade and political problems between the USA and Japan. He had postulated some years earlier that, if an acid and alcohol could condense with the elimination of water to produce an ester, it should be possible to make a giant molecule or polymer by linking diols to diesters. This was soon achieved by one of his team, Julian Hill, to give an early polyester, but the physical properties were too poor for commercialisation and Carothers turned his attentions to polyamides, replacing the diols with diamines. In 1934 the first successful fibres were made. Carothers’ team was working with over 100 different materials and he identified them by two numbers, indicating the number of carbon atoms in the diacid and diamine. In February 1935 he polymerised adipic acid (which contained six carbon atoms) and hexamethylene diamine (which also contained six carbon atoms) to give ‘specimen 66’, which had good physical properties when it was drawn into a fibre. The material was initially christened ‘Tiber66’, but in September 1938 it was renamed ‘Nylon66’. In three years of research Carothers’ team had created the first commercial synthetic rubber with the discovery of neoprene, and now they had done it in the plastics field with nylon. Carothers’ immediate superior decided to target just one initial market with this new product, and in May 1940 nylon stockings arrived in hosiery stores nationwide. At just over one

Tears of the Tree 180 dollar per pair, five million pairs were sold on the first day. When the United States entered the Second World War and arrived in the UK, a few pairs of nylons could buy anything! By then, however, nylon production had been directed towards the war effort, particularly parachute canopies, rot-proof cords, and life rafts, and the ladies had to wait a few more years to have an unlimited supply of seamless or fully-fashioned nylon stockings. The research work of Carothers and his team changed the world, but he could not cope with it even as it was and he never knew what he had achieved. His earlier bouts of depression and heavy drinking had destabilised him. He grew up in a very close relationship with his sister, Isobel, and then fell in love with a married woman, but, when she became available, he retreated to his parents’ house. He spent time in a psychiatric hospital and was advised to marry by his doctor. In January 1936 his sister died and soon afterwards he married Helen Sweetman, a coworker at DuPont. She and DuPont rapidly agreed that he needed hospitalisation, and after some treatment he was released to take a walking holiday in the Alps with his old friend Roger Adams. According to Adams he seemed to improve during this time, but relapsed on his return to the US, even though he was actively cared for by his wife, psychiatrist, friends, and colleagues. In the middle of April 1937 Helen told him that she was pregnant, and on 29 April of that year, alone in a hotel in Philadelphia, he cracked open his phial of cyanide and died believing that he was ‘morally bankrupt’ and that his work had been useless. Helen later gave birth to a daughter, Jane. Let us return to the story of the synthetics. The American contribution to synthetic rubber production during the war had been a vast amount of fundamental research together with production technology and plant, but, when the war finished in 1945,

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181 the cycle of cheap natural rubber returned, leading yet again to reduced commercial interest in the synthetics. It was left to Ziegler and Natta to reactivate the cycle in the early 1950s when they developed catalysts which enabled high-cis 1,4-polybutadiene to be synthesised. The third phase of production techniques had arrived (gas-phase reactions, emulsion phase, and now catalysed stereo-regular emulsion phase). In the early 1960s DuPont echoed the pre-war work of IG/Standard when, instead of copolymerising just ethylene and propylene to make ethylene propylene rubber (EPM) with no crosslinking sites, they included a small amount of ethylene norbornene which provided, after copolymerisation, olefinic crosslinking sites. This material was to be known as EPDM. The ‘M’ indicates that the main polymer chain is saturated and the olefinic double bond is part of the pendent norbornene group. In contrast, butyl rubber (IIR) is classified as an ‘R’ type because, although the main polymer chain contains no unsaturation from polymerisation of the isobutylene, the residual double bond from butadiene or isoprene does reside within that polymer chain itself. All of the elastomers discussed so far have been either homopolymers (that is, one monomer polymerised), or random copolymers of two (or three) monomers, but when some structure is fed into this randomness we get quite different properties. This is the principle behind some of today’s thermoplastic elastomers. In these materials there are soft ‘rubbery’ regions to provide extensibility, coupled with ‘glassy’ regions which serve as physical network junctions at their operating temperatures but melt when they are heated, thus making the material mouldable (or remouldable). These materials have been around for approaching thirty years and, in a world where recycling is king, they are taking an ever-increasing share of the elastomer

Tears of the Tree 182 market, with recent figures suggesting about 20% of the non-tyre market. In this brief summary of the synthetics many materials have been omitted, but one class must be mentioned since it is unique in containing no carbon. This is the silicone rubbers, introduced as early as 1944 and today ubiquitous, being found in almost every environment from the most hi-tech to every DIY fanatic’s toolbox. In order to provide some structure for the identification and naming of the vast numbers of synthetic elastomers which were being developed since the early days of PVC and polychloroprene, a classification system was introduced which is now an International Standard—ISO 1629. The last letter of the identification code defines the basic group to which the polymer belongs, whilst the earlier letters provide more specific information and in many cases define the polymer absolutely. For completeness it is outlined below.

‘M’ Group: Rubbers Having a Saturated–C–C–Main Chain IM:

Polyisobutylene (e.g. VISTANEX), a soft inert plastic. A low molecular weight material used as a plasticiser and adhesive. EPM: Copolymer of ethylene and propylene; the rubber-like materials have a wt/wt composition between 70–30 and 30–70. EPDM: A terpolymer of ethylene, propylene, and a diene or polyene giving pendent olefin groups as crosslinking sites (e.g. NORDEL). An ozone- and oxidationresistant rubber.

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CSM:

FPM:

CFM:

183 Chlorosulphonated polyethylene (e.g. HYPALON), containing both C–Cl and C–SO2CI groups. Cl content 20–45%; S content 0.5–2.5%. Optimum properties 30% Cl, 1.5% S. Ozone-resistant rubber also used in varnishes. Fluoro/fluoroalkyl groups on C–C backbone (e.g. VITON and FLUOREL, copolymers of hexafluoropropylene and vinylidene fluoride; e.g. TECHNOFLON, a copolymer of vinylidene fluoride and 1-hydropentafluoropropylene). As above, but containing Cl as well as F; vinylidene fluoride (VF): chlorotrifluoroethylene (CTFE) copolymer (e.g. VOLTALEF, KEL F). All the fluoropolymers are thermally stable and relatively inert.

‘O’ Group: Rubbers Having Carbon and Oxygen in the Main Chain CO: ECO: GPO:

Poly(epichlorohydrin) (HERCLOR H)—the parent material from which came ECO and GPO. Copolymer of epichlorohydrin and ethylene oxide (HERCLOR C). Copolymer of propylene oxide and allyl glycidyl ether (PAREL). All these materials have good heat resistance and excellent low temperature properties.

‘Q’ Group: Silicone Rubbers MQ: MPQ:

Polydimethylsiloxane; depending on the molar mass this can be an oil, wax, or rubber. As MQ, with the addition of phenylmethylsiloxane.

184 MPVQ: MFQ:

Tears of the Tree As above, but with vinyl groups. As MQ, but fluorinated. These are all relatively stable thermally, and because of their cold-cure characteristics they may be used as electrical insulants, seals, moulds, etc.

‘R’ Group: Rubbers Having an Unsaturated Carbon Backbone ABR:

BR:

CR:

IIR:

CIIR:

Refers to copolymers of butadiene and methyl methacrylate (e.g. BUTAKON ML) used to impregnate paper, but also includes the terpolymer with acrylonitrile (primer, before adhesive layer applied) and the tetrapolymer with styrene (used as a synthetic rubber). Poly(butadiene)—available as high cis (98%þ), high trans (98%þ), and anywhere in between. Can also have vinyl groups present at any level. General-purpose rubbers usually 90%þ cis or about 45% cis, 45% trans, 10% vinyl. High vinyls have some specialist uses. Poly(b-chlorobutadiene) (e.g. CHLOROPRENE, NEOPRENE). Two main types: ‘G’, amber in colour with large molar mass range centred at about 100 000; ‘W’, white, molar mass of narrower range and centred about 200 000. Used as an adhesive or where oil or ozone resistance required, e.g. gaskets, sub-aqua suits, etc. Copolymer of isobutylene and isoprene (BUTYL). Only a small amount of diene added (circa 5%) to give crosslinkable sites. Has a low gas permeability; hence uses in inflatable products, and as general-purpose rubber. Chlorinated IIR with 2–3% wt/wt halogen to decrease gas.

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185 BIIR: Brominated IIR }permeability and improve self-adhesion on building (e.g. HYCAR 2202, BUTYL HT 1066, 1088). Uses as for IIR. IR: Synthetic cis-poly(isoprene) (e.g. CARIFLEX, NATSYN, SKI3). cis level 90–99%, remainder trans and vinyl. General-purpose rubber. NBR: Copolymer; acrylonitrile and butadiene (e.g. KRYNAC, NITRILE). Available with a wide range of ACN loadings to alter hardness; oil-resistant applications. Also available is terpolymer (see ABR) and tetrapolymer with styrene. NR: Cis-poly(isorene) natural rubber, essentially 100% cis, trans/vinyl

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