Natural Rubber From the Odyssey of the Hevea Tree to the Age of Transportation

About this book

This book presents the story of natural rubber, revealing its historical, social and scientific significance toward sustainable development. Hevea is a natural rubber-yielding tree and is among a few plants that have deeply impacted upon civilisation by having made present-day transportation networks possible: tyres made of natural rubber have enabled airplanes to fly, automobiles, buses, trucks and off-road vehicles to move. Rubbery elastic materials are indispensable in modern technology and even in the medical arena a pair of natural rubber gloves, used in surgical operations, are imperative for the safety of patients as well as medical staff. This tropical tree is one of man's most recently domesticated plants after the odyssey from the Amazon to England and then to Asia, when modern science was just establishing in the 18th century. The plantations in Asia managed to agriculturally mass-produce natural rubber at the beginning of the 20th century, just in time for the industrial mass production of automobiles. The reason why the cultivation of it has failed in the Amazon is discussed extensively taking Fordlandia, 1928-1945, as an example. In the story, the unique elastic properties of natural rubber are explained and discussed in terms of modern science, and its influence toward the 21st century is analysed with the sustainable development of the Earth in mind. Not only students, researchers and engineers related to natural rubber but also a reader interested in sustainable development will find Natural Rubber both informative and evoking his or her deliberation on our future.

Contents

PART 1 - History: Before the Odyssey of Hevea
1 - The Prehistory of Natural Rubber
2 - Plant Introduction of Cinchona by Markham Ahead of Hevea
3 - Wickham's Passion for the Tropics and His Encounter with Rubber

PART 2 - Plant Introduction of Hevea to the Orient
4 - Wickham at Santarem and His Tugs of War with Kew Botanic Gardens and the Office of India
5 - Odyssey of Hevea from the Amazon to Kew and then to the Orient
6 - Wickham after Hevea; a Planter Obsessed
7 - Ridley, the Father of Rubber Plantation in Malaya

PART 3 - Hevea Returned and Fordlandia
8 - Ford and Fordlandia: Hevea brasiliensis Returned
9 - Natural Rubber Science, and Wickham and Ford

PART 4 - Rubber, Automobiles and the Age of Transportation Networks
10 - The Society of Transportation Networks in the 21st Century
11 - The Sustainable Development of Natural Rubber

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