Rubber was later used by the Maya and Aztec cultures – in addition to making balls Aztecs used rubber for other purposes such as making containers and to make textiles waterproof by impregnating them with the latex sap. Charles Marie de La Condamine is credited with introducing samples of rubber to the Académie Royale des Sciences of France in 1736.
In 1751, he presented a paper by François Fresneau to the Académie (published in 1755) that described many of rubber's properties.
In 1751, he presented a paper by François Fresneau to the Académie (published in 1755) that described many of rubber's properties.
In 1764, François Fresnau discovered that turpentine was a rubber solvent.
In England, Joseph Priestley, in 1770, observed that a piece of the material was extremely good for rubbing off pencil marks on paper, hence the name "rubber".
Giovanni Fabbroni is credited with the discovery of naphtha as a rubber solvent in 1779.
See Atrocities in the Congo Free State for more information on the rubber trade in the Congo Free State in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Charles Goodyear redeveloped vulcanization in 1839, although Mesoamericans had used stabilized rubber for balls and other objects as early as 1600 BC. South America remained the main source of latex rubber used during much of the 19th century.
In India, commercial cultivation was introduced by British planters, although the experimental efforts to grow rubber on a commercial scale were initiated as early as 1873 at the Calcutta Botanical Gardens.
In 1876, Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Amazonian rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to Kew Gardens, England.
India today is the world's 3rd largest producer and 4th largest consumer. In Singapore and Malaya, commercial production was heavily promoted by Sir Henry Nicholas Ridley, who served as the first Scientific Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens from 1888 to 1911.
Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) was later to become the biggest producer of rubber. In the early 1900s, the Congo Free State in Africa was also a significant source of natural rubber latex, mostly gathered by forced labor.
See Atrocities in the Congo Free State for more information on the rubber trade in the Congo Free State in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The first commercial Hevea plantations were established at Thattekadu in Kerala in 1902.
India today is the world's 3rd largest producer and 4th largest consumer. In Singapore and Malaya, commercial production was heavily promoted by Sir Henry Nicholas Ridley, who served as the first Scientific Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens from 1888 to 1911.
In 2013, by inhibiting one key enzyme and using modern cultivation methods and optimization techniques, scientists in the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME) in Germany developed a cultivar of the Russian dandelion (Taraxacum kok-saghyz) that is suitable for commercial production of natural rubber.
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