Mark Fennell
speaker
177 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Mark Fennell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Now, for people that, just to build an image in people's heads, like what is Kansas City like a century ago?
Good time to be a crazy mad scientist, yes?
Okay, so that leads us to two gentlemen, Nathan Mnookin and Joseph Patrick.
Who are they?
Well, let's start with Joseph Patrick.
And there was one day where they came across something kind of by accident.
Walk me through what happened this one day in the lab.
In my mind, I have this image, and it's basically that old B movie, The Blob.
Am I close to that?
Basically, what they had created by accident was a brand new kind of synthetic rubber.
It takes them a couple of years to realise just how big a deal this was going to be, but by the late 1920s, they patent it and create a company, which they call Fire Coal.
Now this is huge, right?
Because before this moment, if you needed rubber, you basically needed latex trees.
You needed to tap them.
It was quite intense.
It was quite an intensive process, wasn't it?
What is it that synthetic rubber can do that natural rubber can't?
Because there's actually some quite big distinctions there, isn't there?
One thing that's probably worth pointing out is compared to natural rubber, it kind of stank, didn't it?
That would be the sulphur, right?
Showing 101–120 of 177 · page 6 of 9
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