Word: rubbers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hatches. Now our vision was limited by the slits of our periscopes. The noise of battle was fainter in our ears, but it was still perfectly audible. Sweat began to etch rivulets down dusty faces and clot in the stubble of three-day beards. With brows pressed against the rubber cushion above the periscope we watched the battle panorama unroll. The smell of cordite and the smell of dead bodies filtered through the vents and seemed to enter our pores...
Russian soldiers drilled in short-center field. Outfielders stood ankle-deep in sand. The catcher's mitt was a gunner's asbestos glove (for handling, hot shells) with extra padding. It took four hours to make a baseball-from part of a rubber heel wound with string, covered with leather cut from gloves. Bats were whittled out of soft Russian pine...
...Rubber Boss Dewey calmly points to the glowing alcohol-production record to prove that the program was right, the oilmen wrong. The hard fact is that the much simpler alcohol process ran into fewer production kinks than those which knotted up petroleum butadiene production, split as it is among 13 companies, tinkering with five different processes. What worked like a dream in the laboratory is turning out to have some nightmarish bursts in big-scale production. Best example: the Houdry Process, widely publicized a year and a half ago, has yet to get into satisfactory production...
...Tubes. But the biggest "if" of all in the rubber program is butyl, the synthetic from which inner tubes were to come. Ex-Trust-Buster Thurman Arnold once hailed butyl as the king of all rubber synthetics, and roundly denounced Standard Oil (N.J.) for not putting it on the market. Standard's prompt protests that butyl was not perfected went unheard. But butyl, which was once programmed to supply 75,000 tons a year, proved Standard right, Arnold wrong. It is strangled in the intricacies of manufacture...
...Butyl production is still negligible. The U.S. can still use Du Pont's neoprene (production: 49,000 tons yearly) for tubes. But the military long ago grabbed the lion's share of that. This left, as the only tube alternative, Buna S, mixed with the priceless crude rubber from the shrinking stockpile. On this basis the U.S. can afford few tubes...