From the "India Rubber World." LARGEST PARA RUBBER BISCUITS EVER MADE. The market at Hamburg is a constantly growing one, the direct imports into that port for the year 1905, the last for which I have been able to secure reliable statistics, having been 6500 tons, consisting wholly of West African, East African, East Indian and South and Central American kinds. Hamburg is a free market, and in respect of kinds other than the Para grades now fairly ranks with Liverpool. The product of Portuguese African rubbers, known as Benguelas and Loandos, is about 2200 tons per annum at the present time, and these grades are very highly esteemed by American manufacturers. The rubber coming from French Africa arrives at Bordeaux and Havre, and aggregates about 1200 tons per annum, while the Central American rubbers, which now go They weigh, respectively, 1180, 360, and 145 pounds principally to England, amount to about each.) average value during this period of 70 cents per pound, or, say, $7,700,000. This is all controlled and handled by what we in this country should call a combination, or trust, of the closest kind. The business office of one firm constitutes virtually the market for the entire receipts, the result of one of the so-called auctions showing that 92 per cent. of all of the rubber offered at this auction passed through a single house. The market is a most perfectly controlled and organized one, lacking every element of freedom which exists in New York, Liverpool, London, and Hamburg. 1000 tons yearly. THE CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION. Prior to the opening of the Congo, or prior to the establishment of the Congo Free State, some East Indian, a little African, and some Mozambique and Madagascar rubbers were brought into the consuming markets, but these grades, other than South and Central American, did not constitute an important factor in the trade. For the last twenty years, however, they have constituted such a factor, and had it not been for their production in such large quantities either certain lines of industry must have suffered severely, or Para rubber must have gone to a most exorbitant price. The production of rubber is peculiar in this, that it cannot be compared with any of the great agricultural crops,-cotton, wheat, corn, or rice. If in any year the price of these advances materially the result is an invitation to larger planting, with a succeeding larger crop and the consequent re-establishment of the balance of price. As the consuming demand increases, the planting increases. In other words, the supply is determined by demand, the supply itself is subject to control in that it may be almost indefinitely increased according to the opportunity of profit which the situation may offer. Such, however, is not the case with the rubber crop. First of all, cultivated rubber as yet plays no real part in the world's markets, not more than 100 tons having yet come into consumption in any one year. Now, as to the uncultivated plants, the great trees and vines which yield the bulk of the product are not available until they are at least fifteen years of age, and then in the case of the Hevea may yield for twenty years. In taking the latex from the Castilloa, however, as well as from the Landolphia, the custom has MR. CHARLES H. DALE. (President of the Rubber Goods Manufacturing Company.) been to kill the plant. It will be readily seen, therefore, that the industry of the rubber gatherer is still of the crudest and most primitive kind. It might be compared with that of the huckleberry picker here. The result is that the crop cannot be varied from a large crop to a small crop in any year, as in the case of wheat and cotton. The problem is not one of cultivation, but one almost exclusively of labor on the one hand, and of pushing farther and farther into the forests on the other. The average annual increase of the Para crop during the last twenty years has been 8 per cent., and during the last five years about 4 per cent. The largest increase in any single year was 17 per cent. The Congo crop has remained practically the same for the last seven years, and has a tendency to decrease rather than increase. The rubber forests on the Amazon are well preserved, although the hundreds of thousands of Castilloa trees, from which what is commercially known as caucho is taken, are annually killed. In the Congo it is found necessary to push farther and farther into the interior, and it is the necessity for the rubber tribute exacted by the Belgian trading companies that has led to the dreadful tyranny to which it has been necessary to resort in order to compel the natives to gather a crop, which is growing year by year more difficult of production. The fact is that in the great Amazon region, as well as in the Congo Free State, the labor problem is a fundamental one. Neither country is white man's land. No one can live and work in these river bottoms except a native. The mortality in the State of Amazonas, in Brazil, for example, corre holds more men to-day in abject slavery than any other field in the world's work. HISTORY OF AMERICAN MANUFACTURE. Manufacture of rubber in the United States is divided generally into a few great classes. They are boots and shoes, clothing, mechanical goods, hárd rubber goods, and druggists' sundries. In point of value the boot and shoe industry and the mechanical industry are the most important. A fair estimate of the total product of rubber boots. and shoes in the United States last year, calculated at net prices to jobbers, is about $50,000,000, while that of mechanical goods, upon the same basis, is about $45,000,000. In order to make clearer what is meant by mechanical goods, it may be said that they are vehicle tires of all sorts, belting, packing, and hose. The druggists' sundries are altogether too numerous even to think of classifying, but in point of social value they constitute a large factor in the uses of rubber. COMBINATIONS AND TRUSTS. There have been two great consolidations in the rubber manufacturing business in this country. The first was that of the United States Rubber Company, which, beginning in 1892, has now absorbed, with the single exception of one large concern in Boston, practically the entire rubber boot, shoe, and clothing industry in this country. In 1899 a consolidation of a number of the leading manufacturers of mechanical goods was effected, under the title of the Rubber Goods Manufacturing Company. That company, however, did not absorb so large a proportion of the field to which it devoted itself as did the United States Rubber Company. About a year ago the United States Rubber Company acquired the control of the Rubber Goods Manufacturing Company, and thus is to-day the largest manufacturer, directly and through its sub-companies, not only in America, but in the world. Its total net sales, THE LATE MR. ELISHA SLADE CONVERSE. (Founder of the Boston Rubber Shoe Company.) sponds with almost diabolical exactness to the number of tons of rubber produced, so that it is said that every ton of Brazilian rubber costs a human life, and although there are no such atrocities in Brazil as have been charged against the Congo, it is nevertheless true that the laborers who are brought into the rubber fields from the coast do not average more than three years of life, and are, if not in law, at least in fact, subjected to hardships never known or endured by the slaves in the United States, or even by the slaves in the coffee regions of Brazil. This is not the place, however, to discuss this prob- The great builders of this business have lem, any more than it is to discuss the matter been the late Elisha Slade Converse, of Bosof the atrocities in the Congo, but the greed ton, who founded the Boston Rubber Shoe of man as expressed in terms of rubber has Company; Colonel S. P. Colt, the president proved itself almost fiendish, and the re- of the United States Rubber Company, and quirement for this necessary of life probably Mr. Charles H. Dale, the president of the that is to say, the aggregate of net sales,of all of its companies, amounted during the past business year to $59,452,000. Its capital stock is: First preferred, $36,263,000; second preferred, $9,848,600; common, $25,000,000,-a total of $71,111,600. Rubber Goods Manufacturing Company. Both Colonel Colt and Mr. Dale are men of distinguished abilities. The late Mr. Converse, who was regarded as the dean of the trade, and who had gone into it as early as Goodyear's time, afforded one of the best examples of the value of character and temperament in building a great business. A GREAT FUND OF RECLAIMED RUBBER. two processes, one an acid and the other an alkaline process, concerning the respective merits of which there is great controversy. As yet, however, most of the reclaimed rubber, so-called, is produced by the acid process. Many will be surprised to learn that the annual product of the reclaimed material amounts, in the United States alone, to nearly 50,000,000 pounds, and this must be added to the annual rubber crop as a large No article on rubber would be complete factor in determining price. It is used in without some reference to its re-use. It is varying proportions in making compounds doubtful whether the annual crop of new for the manufacture of all grades of goods rubber would be sufficient to meet the world's excepting those requiring the greatest elasrequirements at reasonable prices. It was ticity and the highest tensile strength, and early found that rubber was impervious to has a value, according to quality and accord"moth and rust." In its manufactured ing to range of prices for new rubber, of beform, in combination with sulphur, it was tween 10 and 15 cents a pound. No one bound after a while to lose its elasticity and knows when the rubber particle or molecule the fabric of which it was a part to undergo really disappears. It may be powdered and a disintegration, but not a decomposition. lost through friction, but as long as rubber The rubber remained. It was not of the scrap, or sheddy, exists, the rubber which is same value, either for elasticity or for tensile in it also exists in a form susceptible of restrength, but it was still of great value, and use. In this way there has become estabhow to recover it became the question. This lished in this country what may be regarded led to a series of experiments in the devulcan- as a permanent fund of reclaimed or ization of rubber, begun by Helmholtz, claimable rubber, to which each year's new which is now conducted on a large scale by crop is adding. re 66 MANUFACTURING RUBBER BOOTS: THE MAKING-ROOM," WHERE THE PARTS ARE ASSEMBLED. |