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.

But unlike Ford’s U. S. raw material projects (soybeans, cotton, tung oil), his rubber plantations ran into serious trouble. Reasons: plantation trees proved susceptible to leaf diseases, competent native labor was scarce. Ford’s ripening crop (production time: seven years) is not enough to put in a corner of any one U. S. rubber factory.

Another native rubber is guayule, or Mexican rubber, a dusty greyish-green desert shrub, which has preformed rubber films under its bark. In 1906 the Continental (now Intercontinental) Rubber Co., whose chief stockholders included Bernard M. Baruch and John D. Rockefeller Jr., was formed to exploit a process for extracting guayule rubber. During the rubber shortage of the ‘205, guayule output mushroomed to about 5,000 tons a year. Factories were opened in Texas, some 40,000 acres were put into cultivation in California’s Salinas Valley. When Depression flooded world rubber markets, guayule production dropped to a mere 3,000 tons. Any attempt to mass-produce guayule today would have to start from there.

Most U. S.-produced synthetic rubbers have one or another industrial drawback. Thiokol Corp., which is now hooked up with one of the most up-&-coming newcomers to U. S. industrial big leagues, rubber-minded Dow Chemical Co., has not yet fitted its product for commercial use in tires. Du Font’s neoprene has for years been accepted by U. S. industry as far superior to natural rubber for much engineering work, but its price is three times as high as natural rubber, its plant capacity not yet geared to large-tonnage production. Other rubber company synthetics (Vistanex, etc.) are partly luxury products, no answer to the strategic problem of making tires and mechanical rubber goods. Buna or Butyl tire-rubber plants, left to themselves, would take years to work out the chicken-and-egg economics of low price and mass demand. Hence, for immediate mass production of proven synthetics, Government subsidies in nine figures are probably necessary. One way to hurry down the cost is that already planned by Goodrich and others: use the synthetics at first for the tread only, where synthetics’ superior resistance is most useful, thus averaging out the cost. As for Brazil and other potential rubber gardens, the assumption is that if Henry Ford could not clean up the jungle, only a concerted government effort can.