When Columbus discovered Santo Domingo he found the natives playing with balls made from the gum of the caoutchouc tree.  The soldiers of Pizarro, when they conquered Inca-Land, adopted the Peruvian custom of smearing caoutchouc over their coats to keep out the rain.  A French scientist, M. de la Condamine, who went to South America to measure the earth, came back in 1745 with some specimens of caoutchouc from Para as well as quinine from Peru.  The vessel on which he returned, the brig Minerva, had a narrow escape from capture by an English cruiser, for Great Britain was jealous of any trespassing on her American sphere of influence.  The Old World need not have waited for the discovery of the New, for the rubber tree grows wild in Annam as well as Brazil, but none of the Asiatics seems to have discovered any of the many uses of the juice that exudes from breaks in the bark.

The first practical use that was made of it gave it the name that has stuck to it in English ever since.  Magellan announced in 1772 that it was good to remove pencil marks.  A lump of it was sent over from France to Priestley, the clergyman chemist who discovered oxygen and was mobbed out of Manchester for being a republican and took refuge in Pennsylvania.  He cut the lump into little cubes and gave them to his friends to eradicate their mistakes in writing or figuring.  Then they asked him what the queer things were and he said that they were “India rubbers.”

[Illustration:  FOREST RUBBER

Compare this tropical tangle and gnarled trunk with the straight tree and cleared ground of the plantation.  At the foot of the trunk are cups collecting rubber juice.]

[Illustration:  PLANTATION RUBBER

This spiral cut draws off the milk as completely and quickly as possible without harming the tree.  The man is pulling off a strip of coagulated rubber that clogs it.]

[Illustration:  IN MAKING GARDEN HOSE THE RUBBER IS FORMED INTO A TUBE BY THE MACHINE ON THE RIGHT AND COILED ON THE TABLE TO THE LEFT]

The Peruvian natives had used caoutchouc for water-proof clothing, shoes, bottles and syringes, but Europe was slow to take it up, for the stuff was too sticky and smelled too bad in hot weather to become fashionable in fastidious circles.  In 1825 Mackintosh made his name immortal by putting a layer of rubber between two cloths.

A German chemist, Ludersdorf, discovered in 1832 that the gum could be hardened by treating it with sulfur dissolved in turpentine.  But it was left to a Yankee inventor, Charles Goodyear, of Connecticut, to work out a practical solution of the problem.  A friend of his, Hayward, told him that it had been revealed to him in a dream that sulfur would harden rubber, but unfortunately the angel or defunct chemist who inspired the vision failed to reveal the details of the process.  So Hayward sold out his dream to Goodyear, who spent all his own money and all he could borrow from his friends trying to convert it