"The most important single experiment... in the history of the silicone industry."
Herman Liebhafsky, GE chemist
In the 1930s alternatives to natural rubber were desperately needed. Uses for rubber were increasing, but the supply—trees grown mostly in Asia—was literally being tapped out. Soon World War II made it impossible to obtain natural rubber. However, synthetic rubber had been around for a few decades. Russian Sergey Lebedev made the first fake, butadiene rubber (BR), in 1910. Since then scientists had been in a race, either to make bulk quantities of BR faster and cheaper or to discover the next great fake.
That fake turned out to be the silicone rubber of American Eugene Rochow (1909-2002). Within five years of his first day at General Electric's (GE) Research Laboratory, Rochow made one of the most important materials of the modern age—silicon rubber (SR). A unique fake, Rochow's rubber was the first with no carbon-carbon bonds. In their place were silicon- carbon bonds, giving SR unique properties.
Scaling up Rochow's SR recipe would not be easy. Disposal or recycling of its by-products was tricky, one ingredient was flammable, and another ingredient was controlled by a rival company. Within the year Rochow had a better SR recipe. From Rochow's work sprang the SR industry, which by the end of the twentieth century was producing nearly three million metric tons of SR and its derivatives per year.
