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The Upside Down: Vegetable Leather

In his monthly column, John Mitchinson explores the unnatural history of natural rubber

Photo: Alex Hinds/Alamy

This article was originally published in the February 2025 print edition of Byline Times

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The story of rubber is an early example of how the forces of imperial ambition, technological innovation and unfettered capitalism came together to deliver the modern world. Sometimes known as ‘white gold’, the scale and impact of its cultivation, production, and exploitation is only matched by that of oil.

The story begins in Brazil in 1735, when the poet, mathematician, and friend of Voltaire, Charles Marie de la Condamine, sent a sample of a substance that had, for centuries, been used by indigenous peoples to waterproof containers and clothing to the Academie Royale. He also enclosed the local Indian word for the material, caoutchouc, and the tree it came from, heve. La Condamine coined the term ‘latex’ for the white sap, from the French and Spanish words for ‘milk’. 

By the end of the 18th Century dried lumps of this sap found their way into Edward Nairne’s scientific instrument shop at 20 Cornhill in London. He claimed that, while drawing, he had picked up a piece of the substance instead of the breadcrumb that was traditionally used to erase pencil marks: the cube of sap proved more effective. The discoverer of oxygen, Joseph Priestley was an early customer, paying a hefty three shillings (£17 in today’s money) for a single cube.

It was clear that the stretchiness and water resistance of rubber made it something potentially lucrative, but there was a problem with the lack of stability latex showed when subjected to extremes of temperature. Rubber clothing was a disastrous failure when first tried because it either melted in hot weather or set as hard as granite in winter. 

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The breakthrough came in 1839 when the self-taught American chemist Charles Goodyear heated rubber mixed with sulphur and accidentally spilled some on the family stove. To his surprise, the mixture didn’t melt but charred “like leather”.

Goodyear’s story is inspiring and tragic by turns. He struggled in desperate poverty all of his life – six of his 12 children died of malnutrition – but rubber was his obsession, and he never gave up trying to improve the qualities of what he called “vegetable leather”. 

The process he had inadvertently discovered solved the rubber problem by giving it a stable consistency. 

In his excitement, Goodyear shared his samples with Thomas Hancock and Charles Macintosh, who became successful British rubber merchants. After analysing them, they were able to reproduce the process and patented it in 1843, calling it ‘vulcanisation’ after the Roman god of fire. 

Goodyear sued, unsuccessfully, and not for the first time was forced to spend time in a debtor’s prison (or his “hotel” as he liked to call it). He died, still deep in debt, although widely acclaimed for his vision and perseverance. 

Forty years later, the founders of the Goodyear Rubber Company – now the world’s largest – named their business in his honour. 

Roughly 40% of the rubber used today is from natural sources and, of that, 94% comes from south-east Asia, where the tree isn’t found naturally. At least some of this is due to the audacious scam of a 19th Century British entrepreneur named Henry Wickham. 

Wickham collected rubber tree seeds from the Brazilian jungle (70,000, according to his own unreliable account) and smuggled them back to the Botanical Gardens at Kew. Although fewer than 3,000 germinated, this was enough to establish the British rubber plantations in south-east Asia.  

Wickham was a fantasist and a terrible businessman. His attempts to establish farms in the wilds of Brazil and the Pacific were miserable failures. Nevertheless, he was eventually knighted and is still acclaimed as the ‘father of commercial rubber planting’.

But, as the demand for rubber grew in the later 19th Century, the story darkens. 

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In the Belgian Congo, the gathering of rubber was enforced by the colonial authorities using unimaginable cruelty to coerce the local population to work. Anyone who refused had a hand amputated. 

In the Amazon, the systematic use of rape and torture led to the deaths of as many as 40,000 indigenous peoples over a 50-year period of rubber gathering. Now called the Putamayo Genocide, it had a British-registered company at its heart – the Peruvian Amazon Company Limited. It is still not widely known in this country.

A final rubber tale. 

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, pioneered a new version of the slightly pointed, low-heeled, mid-calf short German cavalry boot known as the Hessian boot. Wellington extended it upwards to protect the knee. In 1853, the American businessman Hiram Hutchinson stole this popular style for his new rubber boot factory in France called A l’Aigle (‘To the Eagle’ in honour of the USA, and now just ‘AIGLE’) and the Wellington boot was born. It was an immediate hit with people working on the land. 

So, a short history of the welly: designed by Germans, named by an Irishman, manufactured by an American, and first worn by French peasants to keep their feet dry.


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