Nonetheless, a few chemists ignored the disdain of their colleagues for rubber, prominent among them Hermann Staudinger, then at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. A well-known researcher, he had already derived the chemical formulae for the basic flavors in coffee and pepper. (It is not unfair to charge Staudinger with inflicting instant coffee on the world.) Sometime during the First World War, he jumped into the entirely different field of rubber because of an intuitive belief that “high molecular compounds,” as he called them, did have basic building blocks, which were fantastically large molecules. Readers familiar with stories of successful scientific mavericks will not be surprised to learn that Staudinger attracted vehement opposition, that he kept piling up evidence for his hypothesis, and that the resistance grew irrational and vituperative. When he left Zurich to work at the University of Freiburg in 1925 he was denounced by colleagues during his farewell lecture. Presumably the antagonism was heightened by Staudinger’s penchant for picking fights. He once greeted the arrival of a rival’s book by gluing a denunciation—“This book is not a scientific work but propaganda”—onto the cover of the copy in his university library. In the end, though, Staudinger’s tale reached its denouement in the customary location: Stockholm, where he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1953.
Rubber and other elastomers, Staudinger showed, have molecules shaped like long chains.2 “Long” is an accurate adjective: if a rubber molecule were as thick as a pencil, it would be as long as a football field. “Chain,” too, is accurate: all rubber molecules are made up of tens of thousands of identical, repeating links, each consisting of five carbon atoms and eight hydrogen atoms. The molecules of ordinary solid substances—the copper in a wire, say—are usually distributed in orderly arrays. Rubber molecules, by contrast, are higgledy-piggledy, the chains scrambled around each other in no discernible pattern. “The classic analogy is a bowl of spaghetti,” Coughlin explained to me. “But the analogy doesn’t really work unless you’re willing to say the noodles are a hundred yards long.” Stretching a rubber band pulls the tangled molecules into alignment, lining them up in parallel like strands of spaghetti in a box. As they unkink, the molecules go from a clumped snarl to their full length, which is why rubber can stretch. By contrast, the copper molecules in a wire are already lined up in an array, making it much harder for the material to lengthen—the difference is the difference between pulling the end of a loose, tangled string and trying to tug at a fully extended string. (The energy required to pull the chains straight is why rubber heats up when stretched.) As soon as the pressure is relaxed, the rubber molecules begin moving randomly, which naturally ensnarls them again; the rubber shrinks back to its original size.
When a lump of pure rubber is heated up, the rubber chains vibrate and slither around each other every which way and get even more chaotically disordered; the rubber loses whatever shape it has and turns into a puddle. Vulcanization prevents this. Immersing rubber in sulfur causes a chemical reaction in which rubber molecules link themselves together with chemical “bridges” formed of sulfur atoms. So ubiquitous are the bonds that a rubber band—a loop of vulcanized rubber—is actually a single, enormous, cross-linked molecule. With the molecules anchored together, they are more resistant to change: harder to align, harder to entangle, more resistant to extremes of temperature. Rubber suddenly becomes a stable material.
The impact of vulcanization was profound, the inflatable rubber tire—key to the adoption of both the bicycle and the automobile—being the most celebrated example. But rubber also made electrification possible: try to imagine a modern building without insulation on its wiring. Or imagine dishwashers, washing machines, and clothes dryers without the belts that transmit the motion of their engines to the appliance itself. Equally important but less visible, every internal combustion engine contains many pipes and valves that channel, usually under pressure, water, oil, gasoline, and exhaust vapor. Unless the parts are manufactured perfectly, engine vibrations will cause liquids or gases to vent dangerously from the joints. Flexible rubber gaskets, washers, and O-rings almost invisibly fill the gaps. Without them, every home furnace would be at constant risk of leaking natural gas, heating oil, or coal exhaust—a potential death trap.
“Three fundamental materials were required for the Industrial Revolution,” Hecht, the UCLA geographer, told me. “Steel, fossil fuels, and rubber.” The rapidly industrializing nations of Europe and North America had more than adequate access to steel and fossil fuels. Which made it all the more imperative to secure a supply of rubber.
“THE BATHER IN THE BUBBLY”
In my living room hangs a portrait of either my grandmother’s uncle or her great-great-uncle. Both men were named Neville Burgoyne Craig. My grandfather, who found the painting in a thrift shop, thought that the subject was the older Craig (1787–1863), founding editor of the first daily newspaper in Pittsburgh. But the late-nineteenth-century style of the painting suggests that it was the younger Craig (1847–1926), an engineer who took ship for the Amazon a week after his thirty-first birthday. He intended to make his fortune in rubber.
Craig was not planning to work directly with rubber. Instead he intended to help build a railroad to transport it. Then as now the primary source of natural rubber was latex from Hevea brasiliensis. Native to the Amazon basin, the tree is most abundant on the borderlands between Brazil and Bolivia. The ports nearest to this area are on the Pacific coast, across the Andes. Sending rubber to those ports would mean carrying it across the high, icy mountains. After doing that, shipping the latex to England would involve dispatching ships around the stormy southern tip of South America, a long and dangerous trip of almost twelve thousand miles. The entire route was so difficult, in fact, that the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society calculated in 1871 that it would be four times faster to ship rubber to London from the western Amazon by transporting it down the Madeira River to the Amazon itself, and thence to the Atlantic. The problem was that waterfalls and violent rapids blocked a 229-mile section of the lower Madeira. West of this stretch were three thousand miles of navigable river in Bolivia and vast supplies of rubber and other valuable goods; east of it was the wide Amazon, and then the Atlantic. The downstream end of the impassable stretch was the Brazilian hamlet of Santo Antônio. My ancestor went to Santo Antônio to build a railroad around the rapids.
Born in Pittsburgh, Craig took his undergraduate and engineering degrees at Yale. He was a fine student who won two university mathematics prizes and was hired by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey before graduation. Five years later, seeking excitement, he joined P. & T. Collins, a Philadelphia railway-construction firm, which had obtained the contract, secured by the Bolivian government, to build the Madeira railroad. The two Collins brothers seem to have believed that their considerable experience with railroads trumped their utter lack of experience with the Amazon. In January 1878 they sent out two shiploads of eager engineers and laborers from Philadelphia. Craig went in the first vessel.
Neville B. Craig (Photo credit 7.3)
As he later recounted in a memoir, winter gales plagued the journey to Amazonia. The storms wrecked the second—and, alas, much less seaworthy—ship about one hundred miles south of Jamestown, Virginia. More than eighty people drowned. Company officers had trouble replacing the lost men—Philadelphians, shocked by the disaster, had lost their enthusiasm for the venture. Eventually Collins hired a new workforce from “the slums of several of our large eastern cities,” to quote Craig’s book, people “exhibiting in shape, countenance and gesture, striking evidence of the soundness of Darwin’s theory.” Most were immigrants from southern Italy; many had been pushed out of their homes for their anarchist beliefs. As my ancestor’s snarky put-down suggests, anti-Italian prejudice was then widespread; these newly arrived Americans in consequence were desperate for work. The Collins brothers took advantage of their desperation to sign them up for lower wages than they paid the laborers on the first ship—$1.50 per day
, instead of $2.00. Apparently it did not occur to the brothers that the anarchists would discover this arrangement, or that they would find it unacceptable.
Meanwhile Craig steamed up the Amazon and the Madeira to the proposed railway terminus at Santo Antônio and set to work surveying the route. He learned of the fate of the men on the second ship only when the Italians arrived as replacements. At the same time the Italians found out that they were being paid less than everyone else. Within days they went on strike. The engineers, Craig among them, constructed a cage from the steel rails for the railway and forced the strikers into it at gunpoint. Reading the memoir, I waited in vain for any recognition from Craig that imprisoning the workforce could have a negative impact on the construction schedule. Ultimately the strikers went back to work, sullenly hacking at the forest. A few weeks later “seventy-five or more” took off for Bolivia. None made it—perhaps, Craig luridly speculated, because they had “served as food to gratify the none too dainty appetites of the anthropophagous Parentintins.” (The Parentintins, a nearby native group, kept potential colonists at bay by cultivating a reputation for ferocity.)
In one way the workers’ flight may have been a boon: the expedition was running out of food. Like the Jamestown colonists, my ancestor’s party was starving in the midst of plenty. Ten years before, the German engineer Franz Keller had surveyed the Madeira rapids with a party of Mojos Indians who so regularly feasted on turtle that he groused about the monotony; Keller preferred the pirarucu, an armored fish so big that Amazonians regularly toss huge pirarucu steaks on the barbecue, and the Amazonian manatee, a bulbous aquatic mammal whose meat, “when properly prepared, decidedly reminds one of pork.”
Like the Jamestown colonists, the railroad expedition was starving in the midst of plenty. Agricultural geneticists have long argued that the area around the railroad route—the Brazil-Bolivia border—was the development ground for peanuts, Brazilian broad beans (Canavalia plagiosperma), and two species of chili pepper (Capsicum baccatum and C. pubescens). But in recent years evidence has accumulated that the area was also the domestication site for tobacco, chocolate, peach palm (Bactris gasipaes, a major Amazonian tree crop), and, most important, the worldwide staple manioc (Manihot esculenta, also known as cassava or yuca). My ancestor nearly died from lack of food in one of the world’s agricultural heartlands.
Only after five famished months did Craig learn from a local resident to fish not in the main channel, as the Americans had been doing, but in the smaller tributaries. Rather than using hooks and lines, to which Amazonian fish rarely respond, Indians sprinkled over the water a paralyzing elixir made from the tree genus Strychnos (the name suggests the poison). Temporarily unable to breathe, fish floated to the surface and were scooped into baskets. Craig’s crew put down their fishing rods and learned to make poison. They stopped trying to grow peas and carrots in their gardens and began eating palm fruits and manioc.
What finally capsized the venture was malaria. Introduced to the coast by African slaves, probably in the seventeenth century, Plasmodium slowly transformed the Amazon basin into a collection of depopulated fever valleys that few foreigners wanted to enter. (I am picking up a story I began in Chapter 3.) Vulcanization brought people back. At a stroke European and American industries found themselves hungering for huge amounts of rubber. Most of it initially came from the mouth of the Amazon, near the port city of Belém do Pará. Each rubber tree produced perhaps an ounce of rubber per day, could only be milked 100 to 140 days a year, and needed to recuperate every few years. As demand grew, Belém’s rubber tappers worked their trees too hard, killing many of them. Then the entire northeast coast was hit by a terrible drought in 1877–79. As many as half a million people died. Abandoning their stricken fields and tapped-out trees, burning with cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, and beriberi, the starving backlanders—flagelados, they were called, the scourged—fled upstream on the Amazon’s new steamships by the tens of thousands, hoping to make a living from rubber. Those with a little money or political clout obtained land grants or concessions from local officials; those with only ambition or ruthlessness just looked for untapped H. brasiliensis and set up shop. Ultimately they created about twenty-five thousand rubber estates, the Brazilian historian Roberto Santos has estimated, most of them small, employing more than 150,000 laborers overall. The throngs of migrants provided new targets for malaria. Keller, the German engineer, traveled the Madeira in 1867 and saw little malaria. Neville Craig arrived there a decade later and saw little else.
The toll was appalling. Craig landed at Santo Antônio on February 19, 1878. On March 23 the second ship arrived and the number of workers swelled to about seven hundred. Malaria had incapacitated almost half of them by the end of May. By the end of July, two-thirds of the crew were too sick to work; three weeks later, the proportion had risen to three-fourths. Some thirty-five people had died, the first of many. Only about 120 Americans, more than half of them sick, were left by January 1879. The next month, my ancestor wrote, the enterprise achieved “complete collapse.” As a capstone, the railroad’s British bankers, perhaps anticipating legal action, refused to pay the survivors’ accumulated wages. Sick and broke, shoeless and ragged, Craig and a hundred or so others straggled down the Amazon into Belém, where they had to beg passage home. But even as they haunted the docks, financiers in Europe and the United States were already planning another shot at building the railroad—there was too much money in rubber to let the idea go.
Even in a time of crazy boom-and-bust cycles the rubber boom stood out. Brazil’s rubber exports grew more than tenfold between 1856 and 1896, then quadrupled again by 1912. Ordinarily such an enormous increase would drive down prices. But instead they kept climbing. Attracted by tales of fortunes gained, speculators leaped into the market—“even the widow and parson are in for all they are worth,” the New York Times observed—and pushed up prices higher still. How high? Meaningful figures are hard to provide, because speculation caused markets to shoot up and down erratically; in 1910, to pick an extreme example, New York rubber oscillated between $1.34 and $3.06 a pound. On top of that, the inflation, financial panics, and political instability of the era caused the currencies of Brazil, Britain, and the United States to gyrate wildly in value. Still, rubber kept going up. Its “soaring price is turning rubber manufacturers gray,” the Times claimed on March 20, 1910. “One ounce of rubber, washed and prepared for manufacture, is worth nearly its weight in pure silver.”
The newspaper was hyperventilating, but not entirely wrong. One economist recently calculated that the average London price of rubber roughly tripled between 1870 and 1910. The statistic is more remarkable than it may seem. Compare what happened to the price of rubber to what happened to the price of oil after a huge strike was discovered in Texas in 1900. World oil production doubled—and prices crashed. Crude didn’t reach its 1900 price for twenty years. That rubber production went up by an order of magnitude while prices tripled is the kind of thing that makes natural-resource economists rub their eyes in bemusement. “It’s pretty amazing,” said Michael C. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economics Research, of Winchester, Massachusetts. “No wonder people were going crazy.”
The financial center of the trade was Belém. Founded in 1616 at the entrance to the world’s greatest river, it had a strategic location—but little ability to take advantage of it. So much sediment washed in from the Amazon that the harbor was shallow and treacherous. Worse, the currents and winds generated by the river’s vast outflow isolated the city from the rest of Brazil—incredibly, from Belém it was faster to sail to Lisbon, a distance of 3,700 miles, than to Rio de Janeiro, a distance of 2,500 miles. In consequence the city’s population had never risen much above twenty-five thousand. The rubber boom allowed it to become, at last, what Amazonian dreamers had long hoped: the economic capital of a vibrantly growing realm.
Convinced they were building the Paris of the Americas, Belém’s newly ri
ch rubber elite filled the cobbled streets with sidewalk cafés, European-style strolling parks, and Beaux-Arts mansions with (a concession to the tropics) the exceptionally tall, narrow windows that promote air circulation. Social life centered around the neoclassical Teatro de Paz, where rubber barons in box seats smoked cigars and drank cachaça, the distilled sugarcane liquor that is Brazil’s preferred high-alcohol beverage. Tall mango trees shaded the avenues that led to the harbor, where gangs of laborers sliced open the rubber lumps sent from upriver, looking for adulterants like stones or chunks of wood. After inspection, the rubber went into a series of immense warehouses that lined the shore like sleeping beasts. Rubber was everywhere, one visitor wrote in 1911, “on the sidewalks, in the streets, on trucks, in the great storehouses and in the air—that is, the smell of it.” Indeed, the city’s rubber district had such a powerful aroma that people claimed they could tell what part of the city they were in by the intensity of the odor.
Belém was the bank and insurance house of the rubber trade, but the center of rubber collection was the city of Manaus. Located almost a thousand miles inland, where two big rivers join to form the Amazon proper, it was one of the most remote urban places on earth. It was also one of the richest. Brash, sybaritic, and imposing, the city sprawled across four hills on the north bank of the great current. Atop one hill was the cathedral, a Jesuit-built structure with a design so austere that it looks like a rebuke to the monstrosity that dominated the next hill over—the Teatro Amazonas, a preposterous fantasia of Carrara marble, Venetian chandeliers, Strasbourg tiles, Parisian mirrors, and Glasgow ironwork. Finished in 1897 and intended as an opera house, it was a financial folly: the auditorium had only 658 seats, not enough to offset the cost of importing musicians, let alone the expense of construction. Wide stone sidewalks with undulating black-and-white patterns led downhill from the theater through a jumble of brothels, rubber warehouses, and nouveau-riche mansions to the docks: two enormous platforms that rode up and down with the river on hundreds of wooden pillars. State governor Eduardo Ribeiro aggressively boosted the city, laying out streets in a modern grid, paving them with cobblestones from Portugal (the Amazon has little stone), overseeing the installation of what was then one of the globe’s most advanced streetcar networks (fifteen miles of track), and directing the construction of three hospitals (one for Europeans, one for the insane, and one for everybody else). A celebrant of urban life, Ribeiro took part in everything his city had to offer, including its sybaritic whorehouses, in one of which he died amid what historian John Hemming delicately referred to as “a sexual romp.”