been invested in plantations.  If Professor Perkin was right when he told the congress that by his process rubber could be made for less than 25 cents a pound it meant that these plantations would go the way of the indigo plantations when the Germans succeeded in making artificial indigo.  If Dr. Duisberg was right when he told the congress that synthetic rubber would “certainly appear on the market in a very short time,” it meant that Germany in war or peace would become independent of Brazil in the matter of rubber as she had become independent of Chile in the matter of nitrates.

As it turned out both scientists were too sanguine.  Synthetic rubber has not proved capable of displacing natural rubber by underbidding it nor even of replacing natural rubber when this is shut out.  When Germany was blockaded and the success of her armies depended on rubber, price was no object.  Three Danish sailors who were caught by United States officials trying to smuggle dental rubber into Germany confessed that they had been selling it there for gas masks at $73 a pound.  The German gas masks in the latter part of the war were made without rubber and were frail and leaky.  They could not have withstood the new gases which American chemists were preparing on an unprecedented scale.  Every scrap of old rubber in Germany was saved and worked over and over and diluted with fillers and surrogates to the limit of elasticity.  Spring tires were substituted for pneumatics.  So it is evident that the supply of synthetic rubber could not have been adequate or satisfactory.  Neither, on the other hand, have the British made a success of the Perkin process, although they spent $200,000 on it in the first two years.  But, of course, there was not the same necessity for it as in the case of Germany, for England had practically a monopoly of the world’s supply of natural rubber either through owning plantations or controlling shipping.  If rubber could not be manufactured profitably in Germany when the demand was imperative and price no consideration it can hardly be expected to compete with the natural under peace conditions.

The problem of synthetic rubber has then been solved scientifically but not industrially.  It can be made but cannot be made to pay.  The difficulty is to find a cheap enough material to start with.  We can make rubber out of potatoes—­but potatoes have other uses.  It would require more land and more valuable land to raise the potatoes than to raise the rubber.  We can get isoprene by the distillation of turpentine—­but why not bleed a rubber tree as well as a pine tree?  Turpentine is neither cheap nor abundant enough.  Any kind of wood, sawdust for instance, can be utilized by converting the cellulose over into sugar and fermenting this to alcohol, but the process is not likely to prove profitable.  Petroleum when cracked up to make gasoline gives isoprene or other double-bond compounds that go over into some form of rubber.