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Show The OMmBA o RumEam OYjT OF T,1E- G?tlT 5SFWTJALtf Of RUBBER GATHER EF fOrtEOtf Tf UPPER AWZOY f?VR n ments, and added another word to the I vocabulary. From this date india rubber rub-ber was more and more an article of ! commerce; it served many purposes, but it also balked the inventors In many directions in which they had hoped it might be applied. Experiments Experi-ments were constantly being made; even the incorporation of sulphur had been tried, but it. was not until 1839 that Nelson Goodyear, in the United States, hit upon a practical method ol combining rubber with sulphur so as to retain all its good, unique proper ties, while losing those that had ma.de it hitherto unsuitable. This procest was called vulcanization. Rubber india rubber is a deflniU chemical combination of carbon ana hydrogen, expressed by the (propor tlonate) formula C5 H8, or CIO H16. It is a whitish solid, opaque, scarcely reacted upon by the ordinary solvents, but forming fluid or gelatinous masses with the ethers and the coal-tar oils. All this refers, of course, to the chemically chem-ically pure rubber. It will also melt and burn. Physically, rubber will stretch, and when tension is released its mass returns to the original position posi-tion and form. Unfortunately, how- ever, rubber in the pure state has three awkward qualities: It loses this distensibility at certain degrees of heat and cold, it softens under heat, and has a great tendency to stick to itself or to other masses of rubber with which it is brought in contact. Now, these three qualities of rubber as refined after entering the market from the tropical forests are overcmoe when it is mixed with sulphur that is, vulcanized. It can then be molded into various shapes and still remain distensible. The degrees of temperature tempera-ture between which it retains these good qualities are very much wider apart, so that climatic changes are less felt by the manufactured product, and consequently rubber articles of an infinitely more varied type can be turned out from the factories. Vulcanized Vul-canized rubber is therefore the substance sub-stance really implied ordinarily by the word alone. CHAPA, YEXCO. Rubber is one of the great essentials of modern industrial life. With iron or steel, with copper, 'and with glass it may be compared in the diversity of its use; it has the advantage over ; these, and may be compared in this latter respect to corn, wheat, and the necessary foods, in that it is capa'ble of eternal reproduction if mankind will but apply to its cultivation his experience ex-perience and scientific knowledge. There is scarcely a device of daily commerce into which rubber does not enter as a necessity, and yet in the annual statistical publication of the department of commerce and labor Commerce and Navigation of the United States the student will look in vain for the word "rubber," and not until he examines the word or the phrase "indiarubber," "India rubber," or "India-rubber" will he be able to see how vast and important is the subject sub-ject before him. This conservatism if the term may be here applied is traceable throughout all the literature of all the libraries of the English-speaking English-speaking world. The aboriginal native word describing the substance first discovered by the early Europeans was cahuchu, probably pronounced but surely corrupted into caoutchouc. This latter word has spread into the languages lan-guages of Europe. In French it is the same word; in German the only modification modi-fication is to substitute a k for the c, and in Russian nearly the same change takes place. To be sure the Spanish uses frequently the word goma, equivalent equiv-alent to our gum, and this is made more specific by adding the adjective elastica, and the Portuguese has the word borracha, but caucho is commercially com-mercially well understood, as might be supposed from the first association with the source of supply. Rubber, or india rubber, however, is undoubtedly the term which will continue to be employed em-ployed in English to distinguish this indispensable product of the tropica. Caoutchouc directly explains the descent of the gum and its adoption into arts, but india rubber embraces not only this history but conceals one of the romances of the industries. Travelers and it is said Columbus himself was one of them noticed that the Indian inhabitants of America, thought then to be an unkonwn portion por-tion of the Indies, played ball with a curious substance grown in the primitive primi-tive forests and prepared according to native ways. This substance was also made into shoes; it formed a protective coating for garments, and from it were made bottles which could be squeezed together so as to eject the liquid contents. This substance was called caucho in some parts of America, Amer-ica, and the gatherers were caucheros; in other parts the gatherers were called because of the shape of the bottles and the uses to which the Portuguese saw them put, seringeiros, syringe-men. From this origin the india prefix of the word is derived. At first the gum, goma elastica, according to the Spanish, Span-ish, was merely a curiosity; it was imported into Europe and studied chemically with great interest; it was made into tubes and put to practical prac-tical use in the labbratory. But in 1770 the English chemist Priestley recommended recom-mended the use of the gum for effacing effac-ing the marks of the lead pencil. It rubbed out these marks and was, therefore, a rubber. It became more tvidely known as experiment showed its value, and In 1823 Macintosh discovered discov-ered the method of waterproofing Ear- |