Historical Account. 7 



HISTORY OF MANUFACTURE. 



Public attention was drawn to guayule rubber, 1 apparently for the 

 first time in 1876, by an exhibition sent from Durango to the Centennial 

 Exposition at Philadelphia (Pearson, 1907). In the same year, accord- 

 ing to the Mexican Herald, the Natural History Society of Mexico took up 

 the study of the plant and reported the presence of rubber of good 

 quality (Delafond, 1908). 



The first move toward the utilization of guayule rubber other than 

 by the natives appears to have been made in 1888, when a company, 

 the name of which is unknown to me, but probably the Mechanical Rubber 

 Co., of Passaic, New Jersey, sent a special agent to Mexico with instruc- 

 tions to "obtain a large quantity" of "rubber-bark," "from which it was 

 proposed to extract the rubber by a process of grinding and washing." 

 According to the account, the agent seems not to have clearly understood 

 his instructions, and shipped to New York 100,000 pounds of the entire 

 shrub! The company in question did not relish paying the freight on 

 the wood, and this item of expense deterred further investigation. 

 However, the shrub was decorticated, the bark and twigs ground up 

 finely, and "immersed in hot water * * * finally coagulating the 

 rubber into one mass. ' ' The result was an extraction of 1 8 per cent rubber 

 (the wood of course not entering into the count), the quality of which 

 was regarded as equal "to the best grade of Centrals," and a specimen 

 was reported 2 to have been in good condition in 1895. There seems to be 

 little doubt that the "rubber-bark" referred to in the preceding para- 

 graph was guayule, though ignorance of the identification was confessed. 

 However, the material was collected at Hot Springs (Aguas Calientes), 

 Chihuahua, and was referred to in a letter by the local agent, who under- 

 took the collection, as "hule." 3 



In this same year, 1888 or thereabout, a Mr. Herbert Wilson sent a 

 sample of the rubber to England for analysis, and at about this time 

 also Herr Juan Fritz employed a number of peons to chew out a suffi- 

 cient amount of the raw material for examination, and this he sent 

 for study to a German chemist, whose report was a practical condemna- 

 tion of the rubber as an article of commerce. 



Shipments of crude shrub made to Hamburg in 1900 were treated 

 with caustic soda and small amounts of rubber thus recovered were 

 placed on the market. In the following year 25 or 30 pounds of guayule 

 rubber were sent to the market from a laboratory which had been estab- 

 lished by Germans at San Luis Potosi. The earliest efforts seem to have 

 centered here, so that San Luis Potosi may be regarded as the birthplace 

 of the industry. 



The laboratory experience at San Luis Potosi led in 1902 to the 

 establishment of a factory at Jimulco, by Adolf Marx, representing the 



l I have been unable to obtain a transcript from the original records. An 

 anonymous writer in the India Rubber World, April 10, 1895, refers to this exhibit 

 as rubber from "a native plant of the genus Cynanchum, of the natural order 

 Asclepiadaceae, according to Mr. Fernando Altamirano." 



2 In the India Rubber World, 10 : April, 1895: "Extraction of rubber from 

 minor plants" (unsigned), upon which I base the account in this paragraph. 



3 India Rubber World, loc. cit. 



