When he died in 1860 he had taken out
sixty patents on rubber manufactures. He had seen his invention
applied to several hundred uses, giving employment to sixty
thousand persons, producing annually eight million dollars' worth
of merchandise--numbers which would form but a fraction of the
rubber statistics of today.
Everybody, the whole civilized world round, uses rubber in one
form or another. And rubber makes a belt around the world in its
natural as well as in its manufactured form. The rubber-bearing
zone winds north and south of the equator through both
hemispheres. In South America rubber is the latex of certain
trees, in Africa of trees and vines. The best "wild" rubber still
comes from Para in Brazil. It is gathered and prepared for
shipment there today by the same methods the natives used four
hundred years ago. The natives in their canoes follow the
watercourses into the jungles. They cut V-shaped or spiral
incisions in the trunks of the trees that grow sheer to sixty
feet before spreading their shade. At the base of the incisions
they affix small clay cups, like swallows' nests. Over the route
they return later with large gourds in which they collect the
fluid from the clay cups. The filled gourds they carry to their
village of grass huts and there they build their smoky fires of
oily palm nuts.
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