The problem of synthetic rubber has then been solved scientifically but
not industrially. It can be made but cannot be made to pay. The
difficulty is to find a cheap enough material to start with. We can make
rubber out of potatoes--but potatoes have other uses. It would require
more land and more valuable land to raise the potatoes than to raise the
rubber. We can get isoprene by the distillation of turpentine--but why
not bleed a rubber tree as well as a pine tree? Turpentine is neither
cheap nor abundant enough. Any kind of wood, sawdust for instance, can
be utilized by converting the cellulose over into sugar and fermenting
this to alcohol, but the process is not likely to prove profitable.
Petroleum when cracked up to make gasoline gives isoprene or other
double-bond compounds that go over into some form of rubber.
But the most interesting and most promising of all is the complete
inorganic synthesis that dispenses with the aid of vegetation and starts
with coal and lime. These heated together in the electric furnace form
calcium carbide and this, as every automobilist knows, gives acetylene
by contact with water.
Pages:
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240