RUBBER: Ersatz & Home Grown

One night last week B. F. Goodrich Co. gave a party in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria. Its climax: Goodrich President John Lyon Collyer parted blue plush curtains to reveal a map of the world. On it a line of green neon lights traced the rubber route from Singapore, via Suez and the Mediterranean, to the U. S. and Goodrich's Akron plant. Traveling the rubber route with President Collyer's warning words was a small cardboard boat. In mid-Atlantic, a loud explosion blew it up.

This was Goodrich's way of introducing a new synthetic rubber, patriotically called "Liberty Rubber" or Ameripol (Ameripol-for American raw materials, mostly petroleum; pol-for polymerization, the process of making synthetic rubbers-see p. 50).

Ameripol is Goodrich's second important synthetic; its first, Koroseal. Both were developed in the laboratory of Goodrich's synthetic whiz, Waldo Semon. Goodrich is building a $300,000 plant in Akron to make tires of at least 50% Ameripol.

Also last week, President William Stamps Parish of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey announced a new synthetic companion to its German-originated Buna-Butyl. He told his stockholders: "We are in a position to manufacture the 'butyl' rubber from petroleum in any required quantities as rapidly as the necessary plant facilities can be installed." Building now at Baton Rouge is a 10,000 Ib.-a-day Buna plant for Standard, from whom Akron's Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. has already obtained a manufacturing license.

But to U. S. citizens worrying about the danger to their crude rubber supply, of which over 90% now comes from the East Indies, neither of these events was particularly reassuring. Instead they emphasized the urgency of the problem in terms of National Defense. For since it still lacks real tonnage production of synthetic rubber, the U. S. might have tonight to keep the trade routes to the East open.

But the U. S. could .not fight without first having enough rubber to fight with.

First alternative to a continuous supply of natural rubber from the Indies is probably impossible now. It would have meant buying a stockpile of 2.000.000 tons or so.

Should Japan follow Italy into the war and cut off the rubber supply. U. S. failure to lay in this stockpile will look like a serious official blunder. No real alternative is to increase the use of reclaimed rubber from its present rate of 28.7% of consumption. For the supply of reclaimable rubber would eventually disappear if there were no fresh rubber imports. Remaining alternatives: 2) to grow rubber in this hemisphere, or 3) to mass-produce it synthetically.

Main case history in Western Hemisphere rubber planting is that of Henry Ford. In 1922, the British Government helped Malayan and Ceylon producers go on an oldtime monopolistic spree that sent the price of rubber (in good years between 15¢^ and 20¢^) skyrocketing to over $1.20 in 1925. To help break the monopoly, Ford, in 1927, got himself two concessions in Brazil. On some 2,000,000 lush jungle acres, he settled 2,000 workers and their families.