Science: Synthetic Rubber

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Many people know that most of Germany's army trucks, armored cars, gun carriages and motorcycles roll on synthetic rubber. Fewer people are aware that throughout U. S. industry for some time synthetic rubbers-;expensive but highly resistant to oil, acid, sunlight, water-;have been doing many small jobs better than natural rubber can do them. Last week in the U. S. synthetic rubber made news on both these fronts when Standard Oil Co.

of New Jersey announced it was ready to make "buty rubber; B. F. Goodrich Co.

announced it would make tires of a new synthetic named "Americanpol" (see pg. 69).

In 1860 a British chemist named Greville Williams broke down natural rubber by distillation, obtained a hydrocarbon compound called isoprene. In 1882 William Tilden, also of Britain, made isoprene by .racking turpentine vapor in a red-hot tube.

The Germans, blockaded from the natural rubbers of Malaya and Ceylon, made some solid tires of synthetic rubber in World War I.

Polymerization (the process of linking molecules together in long chains) is the key to successful artificial rubber. In natural rubber such molecular chains hold the substance together when it stretches. When chemists stopped trying to duplicate natural rubber's chemical composition, and set out to duplicate its structure and mechanical action, results followed.

Nieuwland & Neoprene. In 1900 the late Julius Arthur Nieuwland, Belgian-born chemist, Catholic priest and longtime teacher at the University of Notre Dame, made a poisonous black tar by treating acetylene with metallic chlorides.-At a scientific meeting in 1925 Nieuwland described one of his experiments producing acetylene rubber. A Du Pont chemist heard him, started his company on the trail. With Nieuwland's collaboration Du Pont workers made a good rubbery material first called DuPrene, now neoprene, which is highly resistant to oil. Its dozens of uses include hose linings, gaskets, conveyor belts, rubber gloves, printing plates, refrigerator seals, hospital sheeting, sink scrapers.

Butadiene. Germany's butadiene rubber (better known as "Buna"), which I. G. Farbenindustrie started to make commercially in 1936,15 versatile. Treated with one chemical, it becomes impervious to oil and heat; with another, it makes a tough, durable rubber for tires. Like neoprene, it is made from acetylene (a product of coal and limestone). It costs less than neoprene.

Goodrich's "Ameripol" is a butadiene rubber, but it is made by cracking petroleum, of which the U. S. has plenty, Germany hardly enough. Cracking yields a gas, which liquefies to give butadiene under pressure. Standard Oil's butyl rubber is also a butadiene from oil-cracking. Last year Chicago's Universal Oil Products Co.

announced development of a process by which it expected to make butadiene rub ber from butane for only 20¢ a pound.