Rubber

When the price of rubber bounced far aloft last autumn, different people did different things.

Secretary of Commerce Hoover addressed a Congressional committee on the subject of "a long forgotten relic of medievalism," alleged price-fixing by the English Government, whose subjects Control most of the world's rubber trees (TIME, Jan. 18, CONGRESS).

Tire manufacturers echoed Mr. Hoover, but at the same time were casting about for more virile means of circumventing the British monopoly. The Firestone interests, for instance, had already announced vast investments in Liberian acres (TIME, Oct. 26, BUSINESS). Harvey S. Firestone Jr., shrewd young Princetonian, put off with his pretty wife for the Philippines and other Oriental spots to find other acres where rubber trees might be planted. Last week the Philippine National Supreme Council* rejected his proposal that public lands be leased in tracts of a million acres or so instead of the niggardly 1,500 acres now permitted individuals and corporations.

But chemists, too, have been at work and the country's potential rubber supply has been increasing enormously in their laboratories. Last fortnight the American Chemical Society announced that formulae were now developed so that 70 million pounds, or 10% of the raw rubber annually consumed by U. S. factories, could now be replaced by rubber reclaimed from old tires and other goods.

Artificial rubber had not yet been perfected for commerce, but the new reclamation processes--cracking up old tires, devulcanizing them with sodium hydroxide solution, washing, drying, refining and revulcanizing, with selenium added to the usual sulphur mixture--had produced a rubber at 9-c- a pound which compared and mixed excellently with new rubber at 75-c- a pound in tire treads of the usual resistance to abrasion, the usual heat conductivity.

The chemists did not propose reclaimed rubber as a permanent substitute for new rubber, merely declared that by understanding and using it, manufacturers could protect themselves and the public from price fluctuations to which the rubber market, from the nature of the crop, is subject.