Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber - A Modern Marvel PDF
Preview Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber - A Modern Marvel
Tears of the Tree This page intentionally left blank Tears of the Tree THE STORY OF RUBBER — A MODERN MARVEL JOHN LOADMAN AC AC GreatClarendonStreet,OxfordOX26DP OxfordUniversityPressisadepartmentoftheUniversityofOxford. ItfurtherstheUniversity’sobjectiveofexcellenceinresearch,scholarship, andeducationbypublishingworldwidein Oxford NewYork Auckland CapeTown DaresSalaam HongKong Karachi KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Nairobi NewDelhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile CzechRepublic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore SouthKorea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam OxfordisaregisteredtrademarkofOxfordUniversityPress intheUKandincertainothercountries PublishedintheUnitedStates byOxfordUniversityPressInc.,NewYork #J.Loadman2005 Themoralrightsoftheauthorhavebeenasserted DatabaserightOxfordUniversityPress(maker) Firstpublished2005 Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced, storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans, withoutthepriorpermissioninwritingofOxfordUniversityPress, orasexpresslypermittedbylaw,orundertermsagreedwiththeappropriate reprographicsrightsorganization.Enquiriesconcerningreproduction outsidethescopeoftheaboveshouldbesenttotheRightsDepartment, OxfordUniversityPress,attheaddressabove Youmustnotcirculatethisbookinanyotherbindingorcover andyoumustimposethesameconditiononanyacquirer BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData Dataavailable LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData Dataavailable TypesetbyNewgenImagingSystems(P)Ltd.,Chennai,India PrintedinGreatBritain onacid-freepaperby BiddlesLtd.,King’sLynn ISBN0–19–856840–1(Hbk.) 978–0–19–856840–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 For Lina Marriage for over thirty-five years to someone with a passion for rubber must often have been difficult! This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements Thebasicframeworkofthisbookgrewoutofoverthirtyyearsof reading and collecting snippets from colleagues at the Tun Abdul Razak Research Centre (TARRC). The library there offered a range of early twentieth century books on rubber technology which were an invaluable source of primary data. Second-hand bookshops and internet searches for referenced books slowly filledinthegaps,asdidthedisposalofbooksandjournalssuchas the India Rubber Journal and India Rubber World to the Plastics Historical Society (PHS) by universities which had no space in their libraries (or syllabuses) for old science books. More recently, information and illustrations have come to me fromawiderangeofsources.Manyoftheillustrationscomefrom two locations, the photo-archives of the TARRC and the PHS. The latter set of some 700 glass lantern slides has an interesting historyinthat itwasaccumulated andcataloguedinthe1920sby theResearchAssociationofBritishRubberManufacturers,where it remained, virtually unknown and forgotten, until it was about tobethrownawayinthe1990s.Luckily,thearchivistofthePHS, ColinWilliamson,savedthemandtheyweredonatedtothePHS. Acknowledgement is given to both of these sources for the use of their collections and to Colin for scanning many of the slides onto a compact disk for me. Other illustrations have a range of histories. Those of the ball courts were supplied by my niece, Nesta Waters, whilst Ridley’s letter to Turrill, dated 8 July 1950,wasinitiallylocatedinthe‘MiscellaneousCorrespondence Collection’ of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew by Hew Prendergast, and was supplied to me by Michele Losse and viii Acknowledgements Julia Steele. The final paragraph is published with the permission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanical Gardens. The photograph of H. M. Stanley was unaccountably missing from the two large collections mentioned above and was supplied by the Royal Geographical Society, whilst the illustration of the principles of injection moulding was supplied by REP UK. Permission to reproducethemisacknowledged.WongFotJawkindlye-mailed me the photograph of the 1877 Hevea tree in Kuala Kangsar. The cartoon showing ‘imps’ attacking a piece of rubber in Fig. 13.4 wasdrawnbymyoldTARRCcolleague,PeterLewis,andisused withhispermission.Thistrulyisacaseofonepicturebeingbetter than one thousand words. The early history of the steamship Amazonas was found in the Maritime Navy List Maritime Directory by Bryan Smalley, who gave me its identification number—70893—from which later records could be traced. Details of the voyage to and from South America in the summer of 1876 including the crew agreement, records, and release documents were located at the Maritime HistoryArchive oftheMemorial UniversityofNewfoundland by Paula Marshall, whilst the Amazonas’ ‘bill of entry’ was found in the Liverpool Records Office by another retired colleague and friend, Dr Arthur Edwards. Particular thanks are due to Frank James, a descendant of Thomas Hancock’s brother, John, and the family archivist who providedmewithmuchbiographicaldetailoftheHancockfamily. It was he who set me on the trail of the more than 700 lantern slidesmentioned above.Itwasduringthissearchthat Icontacted Jackie McCarthy at the Rubber and Plastics Research Association (Rapra) who, whilst searching unsuccessfully for the slides with Sheila Cheese, came across a dust-covered box containing numerousdocumentsandcorrespondencerelatingto,orwritten by, Thomas Hancock which had been ‘loaned’ to the forerunner Acknowledgements ix of Rapra in the early years of the twentieth century and had lain ‘lost’ ever since. My thanks are extended to Carole Lee at Rapra for giving the documents to me to be returned to Frank James. My thanks are also due to Ted Rogers of the Hackney Borough Archives who was able to trace the location of Hancock’s home, Marlborough Cottage, from census and land registry records, although its well-established name was not found in any of the documentation.ThisenabledthePHStoplaceaplaqueonasiteof greatsignificancetothewholeoftheindustrialisedworld.Iwould also like to thank Ovidio Lagos, who is currently writing a bio- graphyofJ.C.Arana,forsupplyingmewithaportraitoftheman himself. Finally, my thanks go to my friends at the TARRC, particularly Gail Reader for her help in many ways and David CawthraforsupplyingmewiththecoverphotographoftheHevea tree being tapped. If any illustrations have ‘sneaked through’ without being accredited,IhopeIwillbeforgivenandtheoriginalownerwillbe content to see his or her work published here.
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