Romance of Rubber

Here is a charming artifact from an age when industrialists believed the story of rubber was worthy of the word 'romance.' Produced by the United States Rubber Company in the early 20th century, this pamphlet was designed to teach American schoolchildren why the bouncy stuff in their shoes and the tires on their automobiles mattered. It traces rubber from Columbus's first encounter with the strange bouncing balls of Mesoamerica, through the audacious botanical heist where the British smuggled seedlings out of Brazil, to the factories that would make America the rubber capital of the world. Along the way, you'll find rubber in places you'd never expect: submarines, dentures, telephone insulators, and the Keds sneakers on children's feet. The prose brims with period pride, the kind of earnest corporate enthusiasm that treated industrial history as genuinely heroic. What emerges is not just the story of a material but a window into how Americans once imagined their place in a world being remade by invention and enterprise.