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Chapter 1: What fascinating history lies behind the invention of elastics?
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Chapter 2: How did pirates influence the story of elastic production?
Because some just hang limp and loose. That's cotton. Nobody cares about that. But the ones that are just kind of still sticking out a little bit and you can throw them, That's the rubber or natural or synthetic rubber that gives that elastic its stretchiness. And, again, this is a fairly recent invention, especially if you're talking about waistbands for underpants.
Yeah, and especially if you're talking about elastic that really kind of worked. There were two sort of dives into making elastic. Mm-hmm. One quite a long time ago and then one more recently that obviously worked much better.
And basically the reason it worked much more better more recently is better techniques to making rubber and then better techniques changing that rubber into something that you could actually use like in a waistband. Right, exactly. But we've known about rubber for a very long time since, well, I should say those of us in the West have known about it for a very long time.
Those indigenous peoples of the Amazon have known about it even longer. But I interrupted. You were talking about waistbands. Oh, okay. So, yeah, so with underwear waistbands in particular, right? Yes. Apparently humans have felt shame for thousands of years because the oldest pair of underwear, identifiable underwear, are 7,000 years old. And you bought them at Goodwill last week. Yep.
So this underwear originally, well, even before that, I should say, there was something called breechcloth, and that was just basically strips of leather that just kind of hung down and covered your junk, maybe kept the gnats out, that kind of thing, right? Or kept them in. Yeah, if that was your thing. Sure. You'd probably catch some.
And those are even older than the first underwear, which would be considered a loincloth. Yeah, of course. Which is basically... And there are loincloths that are at least 5,000 years or 7,000 years old. And they are... basically a linen diaper that is folded in a certain way, worn by grown-ups, including very famously, most recently, Gandhi used to wear a loincloth everywhere.
It was called a dhati, but it's a loincloth, no matter what you call it. That's right. So those stuck around for quite a while in the West, and it wasn't until basically the Middle Ages that someone said, we can do better than this. Yeah, and they brought around these things that were much longer than a loincloth.
Most of them kind of, for my research, these braids, B-R-A-I-E-S, went below the knee even. Yeah, they were like a cross between a loincloth and jams. Yeah, sort of. It says here that they were laced to the waist and legs, but there may be lace under the waist, but they're also generally kind of rolled over many times at the waist. Right. I think to probably tighten it up a bit.
Yeah, and everyone said, great, this will work. Yeah, for a while. I'm happy with this. And, you know, then it went a different way. We should do an entire episode just on corsets. I know there's a good article on the site on it. But after braids, what's called the union suit was invented. Well, dinner party fact. Okay, there you go. That was good. I never knew.
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Chapter 3: What role did Charles Goodyear play in the development of rubber?
Oh, you didn't? This wasn't one of them? No, I blew mine on the two. Joseph Priestley, who was a very famous chemist, Jason Priestley's chemist, Triple great uncle, we'll say. I think we made that same joke in the anesthesia episode. I'll bet we did. Because, yeah, that's where he popped up. That's right. Thanks for that. Oh, and the nitrous oxide one, too. Yeah, yeah.
So he got his hands on some of this because everybody's like, he's the only chemist alive right now. Give it to him. And he's like, you know what? This is amazing. I'm writing in pencil, and then I'm rubbing this latex, this kahachuk, and it's rubbing out the pencil marks. And that gave rise to the term rubber. Oh, that's how the name came around? Yeah. From rubbing?
From rubbing out pencil marks. Erasing. Rubber. Interesting. Because remember, the British loved to change everything with an er on the end. Like soccer is actually shortened association. Football, like a soccer, became soccer. Right. There you go. Rubber. That's pretty interesting. I don't know how I skirted past that one. I love that one.
So it became a big deal, and everyone that had a little money to invest thought, hey, we can make a lot of dough with this stuff. We can transform that into something useful, like let's say in a garment. But like you said, they had this problem that it was a very narrow range of temperatures where they could find it useful. So a couple of dudes started working on it.
We've talked about Mr. Charles Goodyear before. What did we talk about him in? I don't know. But I mean, definitely the Goodyear blimps episode. But it seems like, do we not do one in vulcanization? I don't remember. I was looking up rubber or something because some of the stuff in the extra source that I sent you was kind of like, I feel like we've talked about this before. Yeah.
We haven't done this entire episode, have we? No, definitely not. Okay. If so, then I really am just totally out of my mind. So Goodyear was one. He was working in the U.S. And then another guy named Thomas Hancock, an English inventor, partnered with a dude named Charles McIntosh. And they started making raincoats, basically. Yeah, the McIntosh. The classic McIntosh.
Yeah, and so Thomas Hancock was already pretty well situated to ā he was already working on it, right? Yeah. But Charles Goodyear had that breakthrough first. And it was actually a really big deal that he had this breakthrough because in the early 1830s, Charles Goodyear basically became obsessed with cracking the rubber coat.
He just knew it could be used to be made into something useful, right? Yeah. And he became so personally committed to it, all of his investors went away. He went into debtor's prison so regularly, he referred to it as his hotel. Six of his 12 children didn't make it to adulthood. They were just that poor. Oh, man. They had to sell their dinnerware, so he made plates for them out of rubber.
It was really, really rough. So the idea that he had this breakthrough was just enormously rewarding for him, right? Unfortunately... As he was shopping this stuff around, this vulcanization process or the vulcanized rubber, some of it fell into the hands of Thomas Hancock, and he reverse-engineered it.
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Chapter 4: How did the vulcanization process change rubber's properties?
I will. We're already getting sidetracked here. Oh, we've been sidetracked, baby. So when, regardless of who came up with it, even though it was Charles Goodyear, once vulcanization was introduced to the world, all of a sudden, all of these dreams of what you could do with a flexible, durable material that could withstand tremendous pressure and force and heat and cold, too, which was a big one.
All of a sudden, the whole world just opened up. And what was interesting, Chuck, was because it also dovetailed with the Industrial Revolution, Brazil, which was the rubber tree capital at the time, went from just being like this kind of old world colony to basically being one of the most important countries on the planet, like virtually within a year or so.
Yeah, and that was true, geez, for a long time until about the mid to late, about 1876 when these British businessmen said, I'm going to sneak these rubber tree seeds out, take them back to England, and we're going to see if these things grow in Southeast Asia where we have a lot of British colonies. And it turns out it did.
And just about 35 years later, the center of the global rubber market shifted to Malaysia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. The British are thieves in this one. So they kind of like totally ripped that off. Yeah. And Southeast Asia was the dominating rubber capital of the world. Which was way better for the Brits and the Americans because we're friends with the Brits.
Because that meant that these were British colonies, which meant that the access to this rubber was basically unfettered.
Yeah.
There were no trade deals. You didn't have to wine and dine a prince or a king or anything like that. You could just be like, we need more rubber, please. Yeah. Which is, I think, how they would order it. Probably so. So everything's going hunky-dory, at least as far as the British and Americans are concerned. The rubber supply is being fulfilled, thanks to Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka.
And it came at no too soon a time, too, because... The automobile was introduced around this time, the mass-produced automobile, we should say, and those needed four good tires made of rubber. Yeah, and then World War II really, really increased the need for rubber.
I think here it says that in total the Pentagon said that they needed 32 pounds of rubber for every single ground troop in one way or another. Right. That's amazing.
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