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Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
- blululu 1y agoI think your link is broken. Need to scroll past a more recent article on an incident of 19th century American history before the target article on botanicals and golf balls.
- crescit_eundo 1y agoI clicked again on the link I posted to make sure it’s correct (https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/plastic-before-plastic https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/plastic-before-plastic) and it brought me directly to the blog post without needing to scroll through anything else. Wondering where the link you clicked on dumped you into?
- jonas21 1y agoI think they just missed the segue from the intro (about the caning of Charles Sumner) to the body of the article (about gutta-percha). The two are only tangentially related in that the cane happened to be made of gutta-percha, and its easy to miss the sentence where they mention this because it's sandwiched between a large image and a form to subscribe to the newsletter.
- blululu 1y agoYeah my bad. I saw the substack subscribe footer followed by the full Gutta Percha section and figured that it was a separate article. In my defense that was a very circuitous lead in.
- dmitrygr 1y agoLink worked correctly for me
- yugioh3 1y agoLink works fine.
- WillAdams 1y agoThe link requires reading through the specifics of a violent event from U.S. history so as to pivot off the material used to make the device used as a weapon: gutta percha. Perhaps the Wikipedia article would serve the discussion? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha
- yugioh3 1y agoI think that's what makes this HN submission actually interesting. It underscores how this still relatively new material had become so quickly commodified, ubiquitous, and unremarkable that it played an unknown role in one of the most universally taught moments in US history.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dvh 1y agoEuropean spindle (brush) also contains this resin
- userbinator 1y agoPolymers supplanted and surpassed gutta-percha everywhere Gutta-percha is a polymer. It's polyisoprene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha#Chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha#Chemistry
- culi 1y agoGutta-percha (Palaquium gutta) is just rubber/latex, no? The Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) overtook it in popularity but it's basically the same natural latex that natural rubber is made from EDIT: I see they are actually 1,4-polyisoprene but gutta-percha is in a trans configuration while H. brasiliensis latex is in a cis configuration. Not sure if that amounts to any difference in properties https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm
- throwup238 1y agoIt amounts to a huge difference. Cis-polyisoprene has much better stretch and resilience, making it ideal for pneumatic tires. It sealed the economic fates of three continents at once.
- DonHopkins 1y agoYou're not allowed to say that on Twitter!
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoIt doesn't have the same properties. It doesn't harden like rubber (before vulcanization was invented) and it is inert, thus immune to organic decay.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI've seen some pretty interesting stuff made from hardened peat (a Scottish friend of mine, used to make peat jewelry. I have a piece he made for me). Vulcanized rubber was also quite plasticky.
- culi 1y agoRubber is made from (natural) latex. When that latex comes from Palaquium gutta we call it gutta-percha. Nowadays natural latex most commonly comes from Hevea brasiliensis but it's the same thing EDIT: I see they are actually 1,4-polyisoprene but gutta-percha is in a trans configuration while H. brasiliensis latex is in a cis configuration. Not sure if that amounts to any difference in properties https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm
- contingencies 1y agoThe species has apparently very limited modern distribution: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=427301 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=427301 Not much better for the genus: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_id=185147 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...
- bobrx4 1y ago[dead]
- jvm___ 1y agoWikipedia says gutta-percha was a household word as it was a popular material to make items out of. Interesting to see the word distribution in Google books, it was super popular but seems to have died off quickly. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Gutta-percha&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Gutta-percha&y...
- culi 1y agoAt some point we started calling it latex instead. There's still plenty of stuff made from natural latex. The harvesting of latex from Hevea brasiliensis is almost exactly the same as harvesting latex from Palaquium gutta (gutta-percha) EDIT: I see they are actually 1,4-polyisoprene but gutta-percha is in a trans configuration while H. brasiliensis latex is in a cis configuration. Not sure if that amounts to any difference in properties https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm
- sorokod 1y agoThe dash in the spelling is unusual (according to books.google), also different languages tell different stories Russian - looks like a hot topic at the start of WW2 : https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%D0%B3%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%87%D0%B0&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=ru&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%D0%B3%D1%83%D... German: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Guttapercha&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=de&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Guttapercha&ye...
- buildsjets 1y agoDo you REALLY believe that there was a hundred-fold spike in the use of the term gutta-percha in the 5 years between 1869 and 1874, or would you willing to consider that you are looking at spurious data?
- WillAdams 1y agoConsider a similar new material/technology development --- certainly from 1969--1974 there was presumably a similar spike in the use of the word "computer", which was similarly transformative.
- gkanai 1y agoI remember reading about Gutta Percha in Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board. "Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William Thomson predicted that it was going to be hard (proportional to the length of the cable squared).... The two men got into a public argument, which became extremely important in 1858 when the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid such a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and wrapped in iron wires." https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/07/neal_stephenson.html https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/07/neal_stephenson.html
- fennecbutt 1y agoAlso, the victorian Internet.
- ftio 1y agoUntil today, my only awareness of the term “gutta percha” was as a type of golf ball, as noted in the article. I’ve always assumed it was someone’s name, or else a nickname for a design. What a cool material!
- kragen 1y agoProbably almost everyone reading this article has pieces of gutta percha in their bodies, because it remains the filler material of choice for dental root canals.
- porridgeraisin 1y agoAlmost everyone reading this would have had a root canal procedure done?
- kragen 1y agoI had estimated upwards of 90% given that the article is targeted at English-speaking adults, but https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/iej.13822 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/iej.13822 suggests that I may have overestimated—across Europe only 60% of people had had a root canal, with less variation between countries than I had expected. So maybe only 75% of the people reading the article have gutta percha in their mouths.
- perilunar 1y agoNot the only "plastic before plastic". There was also shellac, celluloid, cellophane, and a few others. Bakelite, the first 'fully-synthetic' plastic, dates from the early 1900s.