History of Rubber Research

Abstract After the discovery of the tapping of Hevea rubber trees in the middle of the eighteenth century and early technological applications of Hevea rubber, efforts to discover the chemical nature of rubber started with the determination of its elemental composition in 1826. Later it was shown that rubber pyrolysis yields low molecular weight chemicals with the identical elemental composition. It was long believed that these add to each other by “secondary valence bonds.” However Staudinger's work starting in 1920 proved that Hevea ( H. ) rubber consists of chains linked by covalent bonds. The utility of rubber increased dramatically with the discovery of vulcanization by Goodyear in 1844. However the nature of this process remained for many years controversial due to the influence of the “colloid school” of chemistry. The first observations on the nature of rubber elasticity date back to 1805, but more than a century passed before it was shown that the retractive force of stretched rubber is entropic. X-ray crystallographic studies not only provided the ultimate proof that natural rubber consists of covalently bonded chain molecules, but also gave evidence for its chemical structure. A century ago it was found that polymeric products other than H. rubber exhibited similar elastic properties. The race to produce synthetic rubbers was largely stimulated by the two World Wars. The availability of 14 C labeled precursors led to the detailed description of the biosynthetic pathway by which rubber is produced in the Hevea plant.