It is on rubber that infants cut their teeth; after all the teeth are gone old age makes use of rubber in plates for false teeth.  Ten million motorists and other millions of cyclists in the United States ride on rubber tires that are durable, noiseless and airtight.  Balloons of rubber float aloft, and huge submarines plow their routes beneath the ocean’s surface propelled by electricity stored in great rubber cells.  Sheathed in rubber, the lightning makes a peaceful way through our homes, offices and factories, furnishing light and telephone service.  Divers sink out of sight beneath the waves in rubber suits.  Rubber air-brake hose on railroad trains makes safe the travel of a nation, air-drill hose rivets our ships, fire hose protects the properly in city and town and garden hose brings nourishment to our growing plants.  Rubber clothing protects against storm and rubber footwear guards us against cold and wet.  Tennis balls and golf balls and rubber-cored baseballs give healthful sport to the millions.  In hospitals and medical work the uses of rubber are without number.

To select the most important use to which rubber is put would be difficult.  One student of the subject says: 

“Of all the applications of rubber, that of packing for the steam engine and connecting machinery appears to have been the most important, as it has been an essential condition of the development and extended use of steam as a motive power.”

Even as you read this, rubber may be in the act of performing some new magic, some fresh service to mankind.  And who knows which one of us will, in the years to come, write a chapter in the story of rubber more thrilling than we are able to imagine to-day!

A REVIEW AND QUESTIONS

1.  Who was the first white man to see rubber?

2 What use were the natives making of it?

3.  Who was the first white man to go up the Amazon?

4.  Of what nationality were the explorers who were sent to find out about rubber?

5.  Who was the first European monarch to use rubber?

6.  How did rubber get its name?

7.  How did rubber first come to the United States?

8.  Why are some raincoats called mackintoshes?

9.  Why is Charles Goodyear called “the father of the rubber industry”?

10.  What is “vulcanizing”?

11.  What famous men fought in court over the patents?

12.  What has a beetle to do with rubber?

13.  Name and describe the liquid in which rubber is found?

14.  In what part of the tree is this liquid found?

15.  What is the difference between this liquid and the sap of a tree.

16.  Name and describe the best rubber tree.

17.  How are the seeds spread?

18.  What climate is needed for rubber trees?

19.  Which country formerly supplied all the rubber used in the world?