In July, 1910, Dr. Matthews, who had charge of the research, set
some isoprene to drying over metallic sodium, a common laboratory method
of freeing a liquid from the last traces of water. In September he found
that the flask was filled with a solid mass of real rubber instead of
the volatile colorless liquid he had put into it.
Twenty years before the discovery would have been useless, for sodium
was then a rare and costly metal, a little of it in a sealed glass tube
being passed around the chemistry class once a year as a curiosity, or a
tiny bit cut off and dropped in water to see what a fuss it made. But
nowadays metallic sodium is cheaply produced by the aid of electricity.
The difficulty lay rather in the cost of the raw material, isoprene. In
industrial chemistry it is not sufficient that a thing can be made; it
must be made to pay. Isoprene could be obtained from turpentine, but
this was too expensive and limited in supply. It would merely mean the
destruction of pine forests instead of rubber forests.
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