Much later than this—in 1885, Africa commenced to export 
this article, an industry which reached its apogée after the 
creation by Leopold II of the Independent State of the Congo. 
In the meantime, in spite of the fact of some of the qualities 
of rubber and even its applications being known in Europe 
ever since the Sixteenth Century, it was only during the 
Nineteenth Century, that this product conquered that position 
as an article very much in evidence which it now occupies as an 
indispensable material in modern industry or even still yet for 
the necessities which civilization created. 
Hérissant and Macquer, in 1768, discovered the first dissolv- 
ing processes; in 1770, Priestley vulgarized the property of the 
“borracha” in wiping out lead-pencil tracings from which the 
English name Rubber is derived; Berniard, Fourcroy, Berthollet, 
Grossart and others occupied themselves about this commodity, 
with more or less success. Madier, in 1820, found out a me- 
chanical means of cutting the rubber-blocks in order to obtain 
elastic threads and three years afterwards, MacIntosh discovered 
that naptha dissolved rubber and thus made cloth impervious 
to the action of water. 
The adaption of rubber to industrial purposes such as the 
manufacture of shoes, physical and surgical appliances, elastic 
cloths, railway-buffers, machine-springs, etc., was fairly in full 
swing when the discovery of the vulcanizing of rubber by 
Goodyear sprung up, an occurance which came to revolutionize 
the insipient industry and enormously enlarge the scope of the 
commercial application of that product, which thence forward 
came to’ assume exceptional importance. The vulcanizing 
method consists in the mixing of a certain quantity of rubber 
with sulphur and in the exposure of that mixture to an elevated 
temperature and to a high pressure during a certain space of time. 
The rubber transforms itself considerably; the property of in- 
definite hardness is lost, but presents greater resistency to the 
forces of compression and lengthening-out, supports excessively 
low temperature and becomes less sensible to the action of 
ordinary dissolving ingredients. 
In Brazil already existed up to 1840, a rudimentary industry 
of shoe manufacturing and in the water-proofing of various 
objects. The great demand for rubber caused by the develop- 
ment of the industry in foreign countries and consequently 
the very high profits that the extraction of rubber in the 
Brazilian “seringaes” or native rubber-forests presented, de- 
stroyed all that initiative and Brazil passed into the position 
of a mere producer of the raw material. In order to appreciate 
with what devotion the country lent itself to this occupation, 
sufficient is it to contrast the 31 tons exported in 182” with the 
36,547 exported in 1911. 
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