344 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



[August i, 1902. 



comes to the naming of a new rubber company staid business 

 men knit their brows, and incorporators loot; blank. An an- 

 alysis of the names of 150 of the leading American rubber fac- 

 tories develops a similarity o( mental process that is interest- 

 ing, for it shows six groups of names, divided as follows : 



Personal (Goodyear, Hourn, etc.) 60 



(Jeographical ( Boston. Chicago, etc.) 5° 



Patriotic (" American," " Republic," etc.) 10 



P'.ulogistic (" Peerless," " Monarch," etc.) 15 



Descriptive (Mechanical, Seamless, etc.) 15 



Thus it is seen that the general judgment, which is quite apt 

 to be right, is in favor of the personal nomenclature. It is in 

 fact as if the founder of a company said : " This is the child of 

 my brain ; I am proud enough of it to give it my name, and 

 stand behind it." But the geographical suggestion presses it 

 quite closely, and with reason. With but one rubber mill in a 

 city or town it saves confusion to use that name in incorporat- 

 ing, but the second factory upsets all that. The descriptive 

 name stands next in utility, and no doubt if it were possible 

 would be more largely employed, but the American business 

 man loves not a long signature, no matter what it may mean. 

 The patriotic and eulogistic types have their genesis in the 

 best of motives, but through constant use the significance of the 

 word is entirely lost sight of, and one coined would serve the 

 purpose as well. 



It would hardly be fair to thus dissect names that are today 

 household words, that stand for progress, fair dealing and suc- 

 cess, unless it were to suggest to the new companies yet to come 

 that they might be the pioneers in a more serviceable style 

 of naming. The ideal name will be personal-geographic-de- 

 scriptive-brief. For example : " The Goodrich, Akron, Vulcan- 

 ite Co.," or " The Foisyth, Boston, Soft Rubber Co." 



The late John William Mackay will be remembered in 

 connection with his work in the extension of submarine cable 

 lines, when the stories ol his great fortune acquired as a miner 

 shall have been forgotten. Had he lived as long as the late 

 Sir John Pender — who died at 80— Mr. Mackay might have 

 found himself at the head of a telegraph system as important 

 as that organized by the former. Both men had many qualities 

 in common, and Mr. Mackay distinguished himself by accom- 

 plishing work in the new world not less difficult than that done 

 by Pender in an earlier period in the old. He left an Atlantic 

 cable system of over 13,000 miles, an assured Pacific cable line 

 of half this length, and an extensive land telegraph system in 

 the United States, all of which ultimately will form one great 

 bond of communication between Europe and Asia — across two 

 oceans and a continent. Mr. Mackay was not merely an or- 

 ganizer ; he worked with his own capital, without any subsidies 

 or privileges from any government, and in most cases against 

 enormous obstacles in the shape of older and strongly in- 

 trenched interests. 



A GOOD MANY I'EOPLE INTERESTED IN RUBBER PLANTING 



are unnecessarily disturbed by the announcements, which ap- 

 pear about every new moon, of some new " substitute " that is 

 going to " revolutionize the rubber industry," and, as a head- 

 line in one Boston newspaper expressed it, render "rubber 

 trees unnecessary." Now no article of commercial utility can 

 be made of pure rubber, and in most products of the rubber 

 factory a very considerable percentage of material other than 

 rubber is required in the " compounds," to produce the best re- 

 sults. The only value that any so called rubber " substitute " 

 ever possessed was as an ingredient for mixing with rubber ; the 

 word " substitute," in fact, is a misnomer, for no substance yet 



discovered can be used to replace rubber entirely in the manu- 

 facture ol goods. The increase in the number of useful com- 

 pounding ingredients has had the effect of lessening the cost 

 of rubber goods without making them less serviceable, with 

 the result of extending the use of such goods, and thereby in- 

 creasing the demand for crude rubber. The more good rubber 

 substitutes, therefore, the better for the rubber planter. But 

 not every " substitute " so lavishly extolled in advance of a 

 practical test ever comes into use. The less some people know 

 about rubber, the more certain they are that some waste fac- 

 tory product for which no other use can be imagined will 

 make " the best rubber substitute in the world." But the pro- 

 ducers ol rubber, whether on plantations or in the forest, need 

 not regard artificial rubber as a possibility until they find them- 

 selves able to pay for it with artificial gold as good as the native 

 metal. 



The TREATMENT OF THE NATIVES IN THE CoNGO, and par- 

 ticularly those employed under Belgian auspices in the collec- 

 tion of India rubber, has of late occupied the energies of the 

 Aborigines Protection Society, an English organization which, 

 for more than sixty years, has concerned itself with ameliorating 

 the condition of the natives of many lands. Recent numbers of 

 the society's journal, T/ie Aborigines' Frtenii, conlMn statements 

 in regard to the Congo " horrors " likely to make a manufacturer 

 who has used Congo rubber feel accessory to wholesale murder. 

 But the manufacturer might console himself with the reflection 

 that possibly all rubber from the Congo has not been reddened 

 with native blood, and that his own purchases are from honestly 

 collected lots. But, seriously, the Aborigines society appears 

 to be able to do nothing but listen to addresses which make 

 one's flesh creep, and then issue appeals to the authorities. If 

 they should propose something really practical in the way of 

 remedying the abuses which undoubtedly exist in places, rub- 

 ber men, as well as other people, might cooperate in making 

 the situation better. 



" Rubber has been entirely supplanted in the manu- 

 facture of hose," says a Philadelphia newspaper. The idea is 

 not that rubber men have become able to make up their hose 

 compounds without rubber, but that metal hose has come into 

 use having " all the flexibility of rubber." The Philadelphia 

 paper not having copyrighted its information, we feel free to 

 use it, for the benefit of several manufacturers who continue to 

 make rubber hose, probably in ignorance that their product has 

 been "supplanted." 



The Rubber Trust, according to several veracious newspa- 

 pers, is at the bottom of the trouble over the Acre concession, 

 in South America. If this be true, it would seem that the 

 Rubber Trust is capable of being stretched around more 

 things than rubber itself. 



Austria now has a rubber journal— the Gummi-, Gutta- 

 percha-, Asbest-, tend Celluloid- Zeititng — an interesting little 

 paper lately started at Viennia. Its appearance may be re- 

 garded as indicating a growth in the extent and profits of the 

 industries referred to in that country. 



THE statement appears in The Brazilian Review, of Rio de 

 Janeiro, for June 17, that " Mr. Murdoch, manager of the 

 Amazon Telegraph Co., at Manaos, has brought a suit for 

 slander against the editor ol The India Rubber World." 



