1 56 Miracles Ahead! 



Synthetic Rubber Is Here to Stay 



Will synthetic rubber drive out and take the place of nat- 

 ural rubber when we have won back the Far Eastern planta- 

 tions from the Japanese? If the war should end at an early 

 date, natural rubber probably would return to its former posi- 

 tion, since synthetic rubber will not be sufficiently developed 

 by that time. A longer war might permit the development of 

 synthetic rubber to a point where it could compete success- 

 fully. And in case of a very long war the synthetic material 

 would be improved to a point where it would be better and 

 cheaper than natural rubber. 



Chemists say that Buna S now costs less than thirty cents 

 per pound and they expect to cut this to ten or fifteen cents 

 in a few years, as compared with the ten-year average of 

 twelve and four-fifths cents a pound for natural rubber in the 

 New York market from 1931 through 1940. They expect the 

 synthetic's greater resistance to acids, oil, sunlight, and other 

 corrosive agencies to win it a big market regardless of what 

 happens to natural-rubber prices. 



Untapped Resources in Natural Rubber 



"What, then, of the Far Eastern plantations?" asks the New 

 York Times. "Will natural rubber go the way of natural 

 indigo? Salvation lies in research. Though natural rubber is 

 modified for a thousand different uses, it remains essentially 

 the same. Suppose that the milk of the tree were chemically 

 treated as, for instance, coal is treated for the extraction of 

 chemical values. New life would be breathed into an industry 

 on which millions depend for a living. Homologues of rub- 

 ber could probably be devised which would be just as good 

 and cheap as the synthetic varieties. Compounds could be 



