December 1, 1913.] 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



135 



William Appleton Lawrence. 



T 



HE guayule shrub had been known to contain rubber almost jar, using pebbles from the street and grinding the shrub in a 

 from the time of Goodyear. It was not, however, until a 5 small coffee mill. They thus secured some small particles of 



Xew York chemist-engineer-inventor, William A. Law- 

 rence, took hold of the extraction problem in earnest that it was 

 solved. His success is briefly outlined in the following sketch : 



Mr. Lawrence, a manufacturing chemist for more than forty 

 years, had been located for twenty-live years at VVaterville, Xew 

 York. He was a member of the lirm of Whiting & Lawrence, who 

 extracted hops, using gasolene as the solvent In connection with 

 tliis work, he invented a process for the rclining nf gasolene into 

 rhigoline and had the process pat- 

 ented. This process came to the 

 notice of the Standard Oil Co., as 

 the firm of Whiting & Lawrence 

 was then the largest consumers of 

 gasolene in the country. Tliey 

 therefore sent their head chemist, 

 Dr. Saybolt, to Waterville, where 

 he remained with Mr. Lawrence for 

 two weeks to examine the rhigo- 

 line process. Very naturally, then, 

 when the promoters of a proposi- 

 tion to extract rubber from guay- 

 ule shrub w-ent to Dr. Saybolt in 

 search of a chemist who could give 

 them the clearest report on the 

 process proposed, he advised them 

 to consult Mr. Lawrence, particu- 

 larly as this was a gasolene process. 



At this time Mr. E. B. Aldrich 

 had been entrusted with the whole 

 management of the afi'airs of this 

 proposed extraction of rubber from 

 guayule. Mr. Aldrich called Mr. 

 Lawrence to Xew York and in- 

 duced him to enter upon a scries 

 of experiments of extraction by 

 gasolene which would give a reli- 

 able idea as to the value of the 

 process. At the end of six months 

 of constant labor on this process, 

 Mr. Lawrence reported positively 

 against the use of gasolene. He at 

 the same time, however, reported 

 some merit in another process (al- 

 kaline), called to his attention by 

 Mr. .Aldrich, and it was while 



experimenting on this that Mr. Lawrence discovered the process 

 which is now almost exclu.sively used ; namely, the process of 

 "rubbing and pressure in the presence of water." This process 

 was patented and assigned to the Continental Rubber Co. of 

 New York, organized to use the process, and Mr. E. B. .Mdrich 

 was made president and Mr. W. A. Lawrence vice-president, the 

 latter retiring from his hop extract business to Ix-comc actively 

 interested in the extraction of rubber from guayule. 



It is interesting to note that the first work done by Mr. Law- 

 rence on guayule rubber w-as as early as July, ISOl, and from 

 then until July 8, 1902, continual work and experimenting was 

 going on. About that time he found that after grinding up the 

 shrub in water, a fiber of rubber was formed, and this fact con- 

 vinced him that there was no need of a chemical process, that 

 the rubber could be extracted simply by rubbing in the presence 

 of water. Mr. Lawrence, in a temporary laboratory at his home 

 in Jamaica, Long Island, and with the assistance of his daughter— 

 herself a chemist— made a small pebble mill out of a glass fruit 



William Appleton L.\wrenxe 



rubber. They also found that rubbing (reciprocal) the ground 

 shrub between two rough surfaces produced the same result. 

 The inventor immediately patented this process and afterward 

 assigned it to the Continental Rubber Co. 



During the early part of 1903 Mr. Lawrence, together with 

 Mr. Aldrich, spent months in Mexico, exploring the country to 

 make sure of the shrub supply. When they found sufficient to 

 make the propositinn a commercial enterprise, a small manufac- 

 tory was established in New York, 

 where a regulation-sized pebble mill 

 could be operated. This worked 

 successfully, and in August. 1903, 

 The Continental Rubber Co. was 

 organized. The desire of the com- 

 pany now was to produce enough 

 extracted guayule rubber to try it 

 out commercially. In February, 

 1904, the late Captain F. H. 

 Hunicke was engaged, and, after 

 doing some work in Xew York in 

 preparation, went to Mexico with 

 Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Aldrich to 

 look the ground over for a factory. 

 It was not until 1905, however, that 

 a sinall factory was established in 

 Torreon. Here was produced 

 enough rubber to have the quality 

 thoroughly tried out by rubber 

 manufacturers. This proof that 

 guayule rubber was of commercial 

 value greatly encouraged the Con- 

 tinental Rubber Co., and at once 

 Captain Hunicke's ability was dis- 

 played in the erection of a monster 

 plant at Torreon. 



In making guayule a merchant- 

 able article, Mr. Lawrence gives 

 credit to a number of people — to 

 Mr. .'Mdrich for the pioneer work 

 and the financing of the project; 

 to Captain Hunicke, who did yeo- 

 man's service in Mexico in the 

 early work of production and the 

 erection of a factory with a ca- 

 pacity of over a million pounds of 

 rubber a month ; to D. A. Cutler, the first chemist to give guayule 

 rubber credit for its real commercial value ; to the Manhattan 

 Rubber JIanufacturing Co., the first rubber company to recog- 

 nize its value in the connection with the manufacture of mechan- 

 ical goods. With all of his modesty, however, he is bound to 

 admit that the mechanical process that successfully separated 

 the rubber from the fiber was his own invention. The success 

 of the first Lawrence patent stimulated invention so much that 

 in Mexico alone hundreds of processes and machines were regis- 

 tered. Among the inventors were a half score of Mexicans, 

 among them being Enrique and Salvador Madero. Of Ameri- 

 cans there were: E. B. Aldrich, F. H. Hunicke, A. H. Marks, 

 F. C. Hood, R. A. Leigh, Ferdinand Ephraim, and others. Eu- 

 rope also added its quota in the patents granted to Adolphe Marx, 

 E. Delafond, Guillermo Prampolini, Fernand Tivier, and others. 

 Of the dozen factories projected under various processes, none 

 was as important as the Continental, nor any method of extrac- 

 tion equal in simplicity and efficieitcy to the Lawrence process. 



