Word: rubberizing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Captain Christopher Columbus peered through the South American underbrush and was astonished to see a pair of natives bouncing a rubber ball. Three centuries later Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley could make his erasures with a new-fangled device called a rubber. Two generations after that a Mr. Farris was collecting rubber seeds from Brazil to plant in Ceylon, East India and Polynesia, and Chemist Greville Williams had just discovered that rubber and isoprene were polymers. Then a Frenchman and an American made the plant almost indispensable and the War set half a dozen, nations to work trying to find...
Three enthusiastic young chemists of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. arose and addressed the Rubber Division of the American Chemical Society at Akron to describe the following experiment: By catalytic polymerization of acetylene they had produced mono-vinylacetylene. This they had treated with hydrogen chloride to obtain chloroprene. Polymerization of the chloroprene had resulted in a sub stance similar to the product obtained by vulcanizing rubber with sulphur. Stopping the polymerization at an intermediate point gave them ? Rubber. In short, they had produced synthetic rubber from acet ylene (product of coal and limestone), salt and water. While...
...from discouraged, he lectured on his experiments. One day a scout for the du Pont Co. heard him, immediately enlisted his aid. Du Pont was seeking a means of producing synthetic rubber, thought Father Nieuwiand might be on the right track. Two years later Father Nieuwland's divinylacetylene was treated with a vulcanizing agent and there was produced a material somewhat resembling rubber. It bounced...
...Jackson Laboratories and in Father Nieuwland's laboratory at Notre Dame. The chemists gave up working on divinylacetylene and concentrated on the more homely mono-vinylacetylene. They treated it with hydrogen chloride and first thing they knew they had a fine pot of chloroprene. Chloroprene differs from rubber's polymer, isoprene, only in that a chlorine atom replaces the methyl group, so after that the going was fairly easy. They had only to polymerize the chloroprene to the right point, and all of them were experienced polymerizers. When they finished they put a piece of their rubber into a bottle...
...enthusiastic du Pont Co. immediately christened their product Duprene, ordered a plant built at Deepwater, N. J. to manufacture rt commercially. Since it needs only acetylene, salt and water, it will not be expensive to make. Duprene looks like natural rubber, shows the same molecular makeup in xray, but is denser, more resistant to water absorption, to attacks by ozone, oxygen and other chemicals, to swelling by gasoline & kerosene. It is vulcanized by heat alone, without sulphur. At high temperatures it hardens slowly. Its powers of resistance are expected to give it many commercial uses now denied to rubber...