"A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants."
Theodor Adorno, philosopher and musicologist
Hevea brasiliensis—otherwise known as the "rubber tree"—had been tapped for thousands of years to harvest its saplike extract (latex, the source of natural rubber) long before anyone knew what rubber was. Rubber's chemical composition was finally cracked by British chemist and physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) in 1829. Faraday determined natural rubber's basic chemical formula—C5H8—a molecule that was later named "isoprene." Rubber is composed of many isoprene units strung together, forming a polymer—polyisoprene.
Attempting to mimic the natural product of Hevea brasiliensis, scientists set out to reproduce polyfeoprene in the laboratory—and met mostly with failure. Fed- up with isoprene, scientists ditched it for butadiene (C4H6), hoping the change would be more successful in yielding a synthetic polymer similar to rubber. Working in St. Petersburg, and using ethanol to make butadiene and sodium to kick-start the polymerization, Russian-Soviet chemist Sergey Lebedev (1874-1934) cooked up polybutadiene, producing the first fake rubber in 1910. By the 1940s, the Soviet Union had the largest synthetic rubber industry in the world.
The discovery of polybutadiene, which is known today as butadiene rubber (BR), sparked the synthetic rubber industry. Other synthetic rubbers followed BR; styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) in the 1930s and silicone rubber (SR) in the 1940s. By the end of the 1960s, synthetic rubber had natural rubber on the ropes, and today synthetic rubber beats natural rubber in both production and usage. All thanks to Levedev who showed us how to fake it.
