Indian-rubber to cover his quadrant circle, when
set up, and save him the trouble of removing it
to shelter in bad weather. At the mission of the
Cordilleras and Andes they use, he said, water-
proof boots, which appeared to have been smoked.
Sprinkling with Spanish white, or even dust
removed the stickiness of surface. In one place
he found caoutchouc, wrapped in two leaves of
the bananier, used as a torch; and when
afterwards in seventeen 'fifty-one, M. Fresneau
discovered in the French colony of Cayenne, trees
yielding elastic resin, M. Condamine revived the
discussion by dwelling upon the probably great
commercial value of such a discovery.
Nevertheless, the only commercial use found for the
caoutchouc in France was that of the surgeons
who dissolved the rubber in ether, and by
successive dippings of wax rods obtained elastic
coatings from which, the wax being melted out
by boiling water, elastic surgical tubes, seldom
of uniform thickness, were obtained.
Somewhat later it was applied by Messrs. Charles
and Robert to the manufacture of an air-tight
varnish for balloons; but even at the end of the
last century it was rarely put in Europe to
any use except that of rubbing out pencil
marks; little was known of it more than that it
came from America, and that its price was a
guinea an ounce.

Its toughness, elasticity, imperviousness to
water and air, its power to withstand corrosion
by all acids (except concentrated sulphuric or
nitric, which act on it slowly) all alkalies,
chlorine and the chemical agents, with other
qualities only now being recognised, passed
wholly without practical attention until our own
day— until, in fact, the year eighteen hundred
and nineteen, when Mr. Thomas Hancock, who is
fairly to be called the founder of the new school
of industry arising from the application of
caoutchouc to the arts, and who deserves a
statue in Indian-rubber more perennial than brass,
began his experiments. He looked for a
convenient solvent, and looked in the right direction,
namely, to oil of turpentine; but he failed
at first, abandoned that search for a time, and in
eighteen 'twenty took out his first patent for
cutting the raw bottle-shaped mass into glove
wrists, waist-belts, garters, stocking tops, straps,
waistcoat backs, unpickable pockets, boots,
shoes, pattens, clogs, &c. His elastic pieces
were fastened where they were inserted by
stitches, from which the Indian-rubber broke
away. Then, thicker edges were made, and
prepared by steeping in hot water. The
imported bottle of rubber was cut into rings for
gloves and stockings. Next, a way was found
of joining cut edges by pressure under hot water,
and the use was discovered of a stream of cold
water to keep constantly wet the sharp blade
that passed through the rubber to be cut. But
the great help in Mr. Hancock's manufactory
came from the use of a small hand-machine— a
masticator with sharp and strong teeth, like the
hand masticator now generally used for mincing
meat. The imported rubber was by no means
uniformly pure. Thus torn and ground while
heating itself with such tough resistance that a
man could only work the handle on two ounces
at a time, the tearing and grinding with the heat
reduced all to an uniform workable mass. All
waste cuttings and scraps of the workshop
went into the mill, and the process, unpatented,
was, wonderful to tell, kept a secret for twelve
years by Mr. Hancock and his workmen—
inquisitive minds being put on the wrong scent
by the name of "pickling" given to the secret
process. The first wooden hand-machine had
soon been replaced by a larger iron machine
worked by horse-power, which prepared fifteen
pounds at a time, and of which the work was
facilitated by previous heating of the raw
rubber to a temperature of three hundred
degrees. The charge of a steam masticator
now, in the Manchester works, is nearly, or
quite, two hundred pounds. This works the
rubber into a solid uniform block six feet long,
a foot wide, and seven inches thick.

The fifteen-pound blocks made by Mr.
Hancock's smaller horse-power machine in eighteen
'twenty-one, were in the following year cut by
him with an apparatus still in use for the
purpose at all Indian-rubber works. The block, fixed
on the movable bottom of a sort of trough, was
raised, by simple machinery, to meet the sharp
wetted edge of a slicing-knife that works over its
face. Thus it was cut into those smooth oblong
cakes for the drawing-school, which used to show
the sawing strokes of the knife as a sort of grain
upon their surface. In the same year, Mr.
Hancock solved the problem of the turpentine
solution, and in the next year he took out his
patent for undersheathing ships (beneath their
copper bottoms) with a mixture of dissolved
caoutchouc, pitch, tar, &c. Now followed,
naturally enough, the use of solution as a
cement instead of thread, in the joining of
Indian-rubber to other substances, as in gloves,
&c. Boots coated with the solution became
waterproofed. Then also the way was open,
and was taken at once to many new appliances
of caoutchouc, as in noiseless wheels, cushions
of billiard-tables, gas-bags, collars for stop-
cocks, experimental balloons. By mixing the
liquid caoutchouc brought from America, with
felt, hair, and wool under pressure, Mr.
Hancock made a strong watertight artificial leather.
But in the same year, eighteen 'twenty-four, a
new name became prominent.

Five years earlier the late Mr. Charles Macintosh,
then a manufacturer at Glasgow of the violet
red dye called cudbear, had contracted with the
Glasgow gas works for their tar and ammoniacal
refuse. Getting naphtha from this, it occurred
to him that naphtha might prove a good solvent
of Indian-rubber. He therefore experimented,
and succeeded in doing with naphtha what
Hancock had done with turpentine. Then, in the year
'twenty-four, he took out a patent for the
use of his solution in a new method of water-
proofing. He made a smooth sandwich of his
caoutchouc paste, between two large slices of
cloth, pressing and smoothing all together under
rollers; and this double fabric was the water-