gress that by his process
rubber could be made for less than 25 cents a pound it meant that these
plantations would go the way of the indigo plantations when the Germans
succeeded in making artificial indigo. If Dr. Duisberg was right when he
told the congress that synthetic rubber would "certainly appear on the
market in a very short time," it meant that Germany in war or peace
would become independent of Brazil in the matter of rubber as she had
become independent of Chile in the matter of nitrates.

As it turned out both scientists were too sanguine. Synthetic rubber has
not proved capable of displacing natural rubber by underbidding it nor
even of replacing natural rubber when this is shut out. When Germany
was blockaded and the success of her armies depended on rubber, price
was no object. Three Danish sailors who were caught by United States
officials trying to smuggle dental rubber into Germany confessed that
they had been selling it there for gas masks at $73 a pound. The German
gas masks in the latter part of the war were made without rubber and
were frail and leaky. They could not have withstood the new gases which
American chemists were preparing on an unprecedented scale. Every scrap
of old rubber in Germany was saved and worked over and over and diluted
with fillers and surrogates to the limit of elasticity. Spring tires
were substituted for pneumatics. So it is evident that the supply of
synthetic rubber could not have been adequate or satisfactory. Neither,
on the other hand, have the British made a success of the Perkin
process, although they spent $200,000 on it in the first two years. But,
of course, there was not the same necessity for it as in the case of
Germany, for England had practically a monopoly of the world's supply of
natural rubber either through owning plantations or controlling
shipping. If rubber could not be manufactured profitably in Germany when
the demand was imperative and price no consideration it can hardly be
expected to compete with the natural under peace conditions.

The problem of synthetic rubber has then been solved scientifically but
not industrially. It can be made but cannot be made to pay. The
difficulty is to find a cheap enough material to start with. We can make
rubber out of potatoes--but potatoes have other uses. It would require
more land and more valuable land to raise the potatoes than to raise the
rubber. We can get isoprene by the distillation of turpentine--b