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Inventor of rubber. History of automobile tires. About Goodyear Manufacturing

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It is difficult to imagine today's busy and technologically advanced human life without such material as rubber. But just a few centuries ago one could only dream of high-quality rubber products. Now this material is indispensable in medicine, industry, technology, and everyday life.

The appearance of rubber in people's lives happened quite suddenly, after Columbus discovered America. It originates from rubber, which was produced from the Hevea tree. Having discovered a new continent, the traveler paid attention to the development of the Indians and their everyday objects. What struck him most was the ball the children were playing with, made of an unknown material. The weighty black sphere was quite bouncy and light, far superior in quality to ordinary European leather balls.

This is how Columbus learned about trees growing in Indonesia and Brazil, cuts in which produced stretchy juice-latex. It was he who gave rise to a new material from which rubber products are made in modern times. Rubber of that time was quite often used in clothing or construction due to its waterproof properties. Over many years of improvement, many experiments were carried out with rubber, both physical and chemical, in the hope of improving its properties.

It was only in 1893 that the scientist Goodyear was able to make a modern type of rubber from rubber, which is so widely used today. Thanks to proper heat treatment, rubber was able to obtain the desired properties and forever turn into universal and durable rubber. In the twentieth century, rubber began to be actively used as a high-quality and reliable insulator, laying thousands of new electrical routes around the world.

Further more. Rubber has become an integral part of industry and human life. Rubber elements were present in household appliances, furniture, clothing, shoes, hygiene items, and dishes. As for large industrial areas, rubber has become an integral part of all processes. Today it is difficult to imagine what car tires, cutting wheels, spare parts, construction tools and much more would look like if rubber had not been produced one day as a separate type of material.

The USSR was able to put into production rubber not only of natural origin, but also synthetic, having learned to extract and synthesize rubber, and then rubber itself from natural gases, oil, and alcohol. Western scientists for a long time did not recognize this fact as possible, since for them this technology was unknown, but years later, European and American scientists recognized synthetic rubber as a reality. This allowed the USSR to step far ahead technologically and significantly save the country’s budget, avoiding expensive purchases of raw materials for rubber from Brazil or Indonesia.

Synthetic rubber was practically not inferior in properties to the natural component, but its low elasticity did not allow it to be used to make such important industrial products as automobile and aircraft tires. Over time, thanks to modern developments and constant experiments with temperature conditions and chemical components, this problem was completely resolved.

Thus, generous nature and scientific factors were able to give the world such a material as rubber, which allows the development of modern technical and medical developments, improving them with its natural properties. Today, rubber is one of the most durable, durable and versatile materials of mankind.

The history of the discovery of rubber begins with the discovery of the American continent. For a long time, the indigenous people of Central and South America obtained rubber by collecting the milky sap from rubber trees.

Columbus once noticed that the balls the Indians played with were made of black rubber, and they bounced much better than the leather balls made by the Europeans. Not only balls were made from rubber, but also utensils, they used to seal the bottom of a pie, they created “stockings” that did not get wet (this was a rather painful technology: the legs were covered with a rubber mass, then they had to be held over the fire until a waterproof coating was formed) . Rubber was also used as glue; the Indians used it to decorate their bodies with feathers.

Columbus reported the existence of an extraordinary substance with numerous properties, but Europe did not pay due attention to this, although even the first settlers of the New World actively used rubber. For a long time, rubber was used to create soft toys, and attempts were also made to create a waterproof coating for shoes.

It was only in 1839 that the American inventor Charles Goodyear made a discovery. He stabilized the elastic composition of rubber by mixing raw rubber and sulfur, with further heating. This method was called vulcanization, most likely it was the first polymerization process in industry.

The material that was obtained as a result of the vulcanization process was called rubber. Later, rubber began to be actively used in the engineering industry, creating various seals and hoses. And when electrical engineering was just beginning to develop, it needed durable and elastic material for cables. Today rubber is used everywhere. These rubber mats are in great demand http://www.ru.all.biz/kovriki-rezinovye-bgg1001384. They are used in corridors, vestibules, in front of the entrance to a room, on the porch. These mats prevent dirt and snow from entering your home.

The production of rubber from refined petroleum products and gases dates back to 1951. For a long time, artificially created rubber was superior to real rubber in all respects except one - elasticity. But this problem was also solved.

Thus, the Hevea tree, being a natural gift, random experiments, and long-term painstaking work of scientists have developed one of the most necessary and universally used materials - rubber. Rubber is in demand every day, in various situations, in absolutely any field of human activity.

And products made from it have become firmly established in our everyday life: they are in demand in everyday life, medicine, in almost all industries - there’s too much to list. But the history of the appearance of seemingly natural and familiar rubber in our lives is not as simple as it might seem at first glance. In general, the “history of rubber” is the history of the penetration and development of rubber by the European community.

The beginning of this story dates back to the time when Columbus, in the then exotic America, saw Indians playing a ball, quite heavy, made of black mass, bouncing much better than leather European balls. The secret of making these balls lay in the interesting properties discovered by the Indians of rubber trees that grow in countries with a tropical climate - Indonesia, India, Ceylon, Brazil. The most common is the Brazilian Hevea, its height is 30 meters, its girth is 3.5 meters. When its bark is cut, a white milky sap, latex, emerges. If you collect more of it and hold it in the sun, you will get a yellowish mass, viscous and slightly sticky. A few more manipulations - and the Indians used natural rubber for both entertainment and household needs: they made bottles from it, coated pies, some Indians covered their legs with this mass and held it over the fire, it was painful, but the Indian received a pair of waterproof stockings for life . The natives of America found practical application not only of the waterproofness and elasticity of rubber, but also of its stickiness: for decoration, they glued bird feathers to the body with rubber.

The next stage is the journey through South America of the French traveler C. Condamine, who discovered rubber for the second time. The history of natural rubber usually dates back to 1738, when Condamine presented samples of rubber and a description of methods for its extraction to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Unfortunately, this report did not produce significant practical results: the brought samples dried out and hardened. Then they managed to use rubber for only one thing - erasing pencil notes. Thus, the eraser is the first thing made from rubber in Europe.

Another 80 years have passed. C. McIntosh was looking for a way to return natural properties to dried rubber. Quite by accident, he spilled solvent naphtha (a substance extracted from coal tar) onto a sample of rubber. Mackintosh impregnated the dense material with rubber, and it became waterproof. This is how the first mackintosh raincoats appeared, and then the first galoshes and bags for transporting mail. True, then a big drawback of all these products became obvious, which made them completely unsuitable: in extreme heat the material became too soft, and in cold weather it hardened like stone.

1839 America. Charles Goodyear was looking for a way to make rubber insensitive to temperature changes. Repeated experiments required money, and as a result the researcher ended up in a debtor's prison; It was there, continuing his experiments, that he discovered that the stickiness disappears if you sprinkle the rubber with sulfur and dry it. Having already left prison, Goodyear, again absent-mindedly, put a piece of rubber with sulfur not on the table, but on the hot stove. The mistake turned out to be a discovery, because on the stove Goodyear found not a sticky mixture, but a dry, soft, elastic piece of... already rubber. Under the influence of sulfur and moderate heating, rubber acquired greater strength, hardness, and became less sensitive to temperature changes. The process was called vulcanization, and vulcanized rubber was called rubber. Rubber products began to quickly conquer the market, and at the end of the 19th century, during the period of widespread electrification, rubber began to be used as a good insulator.

More and more rubber was needed. Huge Hevea plantations grew in South America and Indonesia. Around the same time, one enterprising Englishman secretly took 70 thousand Hevea seeds from Brazil, but they took root only in one place - on the Ceylon Islands, which then belonged to England. Two large monopolists appeared on the world rubber market, and it became clear: natural rubber is not economical or profitable; it is necessary to discover a method for producing artificial rubber. The further history of the development of rubber is the history of chemical research, mainly of Russian chemical science.

In Russia, the rubber industry emerged in the first half of the 19th century. Before the revolution, rubber production was represented by 4 enterprises: “Treugolnik”, “Provodnik” and relatively small plants “Bogatyr” and “Kauchuk”. In 1913, they employed 23 thousand people and produced mainly shoes; raw materials and equipment were foreign, technical management was carried out by foreigners. Few people know that the production of toilet sponge was the secret of the Triangle plant in the 19th century; Oddly enough, this simple item was the most competitive rubber product on the world market. After the October Revolution, the rubber industry was a fairly powerful industry. A general course towards industrialization was taken, and therefore the need for components for rubber products increased sharply. But rubber production was exclusively dependent on the import of natural rubber. There were two possible solutions to the problem. The first is the search for rubber plants suitable for cultivation in areas with a temperate climate. In the USSR, N.I. Vavilov did this; in the USA, the initiators of this work were T. Edison and H. Ford.

The second option is to create synthetic rubber. Chemical studies of the composition of rubber began with the experiments of M. Faraday in 1826. In 1879, A. Bushard observed the transformation of isoprene into a rubber-like mass, and in 1910, I. L. Kondakov observed a similar transformation of dimethylbutadiene. In 1909, Sergei Vasilyevich Lebedev showed a substance close to rubber, prepared from divinyl, a colorless volatile gas. But after much work, he managed to get only 19 grams. In Russia, I. I. Ostromyslensky worked in the same direction, conducting experiments at the Bogatyr plant, in Germany - K. Harries, in England - F. Matthews and E. Strakhedge. Thus, science followed in the footsteps of nature: first it was necessary to obtain a polymer of diene hydrocarbons, and then synthesize rubber from them.

In 1926, the Soviet government announced a worldwide competition for the production of artificial rubber, and 3 conditions were put forward: 1) the raw materials must be cheap; 2) quality is no worse than natural; 3) the period before presentation of development results is 2 years. In May 1928, this competition was won by S.V. Lebedev. As a raw material, he used ordinary potatoes, from which he obtained alcohol, and from alcohol - divinyl. Moreover, two years ago he received 5 grams of divinyl from 1 liter of alcohol, and now - 50 grams, thereby reducing costs by 10 times. But this absolute breakthrough did not solve the problem, since, for example, it took 500 kg of potatoes to make one car tire. Then scientists, having improved the invention of S.V. Lebedev, began to extract divinyl from natural gases. And already in 1929, the government decided to build in Leningrad a pilot plant for producing synthetic rubber from alcohol using the Lebedev method and two more plants that were supposed to test other well-known methods: B.V. Byzov and a group of scientists led by A.L. Klebansky . On February 15, 1931, newspapers around the world reported that the first large batch of artificial rubber was produced in the USSR. Neither Germany nor England at that time were ready to offer their own solution to this industrial problem. It is interesting that T. Edison in his interview assessed this event this way: “The news that the Soviets have achieved success in the production of synthetic rubber from oil is incredible. This cannot be done. I would even say more: this entire report is fake. Based on my own experience and the experience of others, it cannot now be said that the production of synthetic rubber will ever be successful." And yet, already in 1932, the first synthetic rubber plant produced products in Yaroslavl.

Since 1951, the production of rubber from petroleum gases and petroleum products began. For a long time, artificial rubber, while superior to real rubber in certain indicators (temperature range, strength, chemical resistance), was inferior in one thing - elasticity (which is very important for, for example, automobile and aircraft tires), but this problem was solved.

Thus, a natural gift - the Hevea tree, and a number of accidents, and the long painstaking work of scientists have made rubber one of the most necessary and universal materials, in demand every day, in a variety of situations, in a variety of fields of human activity.

Who invented winter tires?

The calendar of a car enthusiast is different from the calendar of an ordinary person. The change of seasons for a car owner is marked by an important event for him: the change of tires. As it turned out, not everyone knows and understands why it is necessary to “change your shoes” before and after the cold weather begins. Many perceive this only as a reason for the traffic cops to find fault. In fact, traffic safety directly depends on it, and changing tires is a vital matter!

1. Differences between summer and winter tires

The main differences between summer and winter tires are the composition of the rubber itself and the tread pattern.

Rubber, like any other material, hardens at low temperatures. Accordingly, in the cold the tire loses its softness and becomes “plastic”. This has a negative impact on the tire itself - and rather on driving safety. It is recommended to change summer tires to winter ones when the air temperature drops to +7°C. At this temperature, and even more so at lower temperatures, summer tires become unsafe.

Winter tires, due to special additives, remain soft even in the cold. Knowing this, you will understand why you should not drive on winter tires in the summer: in warm weather, and even more so in the heat, winter tires become too soft to ensure driving safety.

The tread of winter tires has a pattern made up of “checkered” patterns of various configurations. Their purpose is to provide tire traction on snowy roads. On summer asphalt, “checkered” tires are useless and even dangerous, since such a tread reduces the car’s handling.

2. When did winter tires appear?

The first attempts to create winter tires were made in Finland. The pioneer was the company Suomen Gummitehtas, later renamed, and known today as Nokian.

Winter tires went on sale in the 60s of the 20th century. They differed from summer tires only in the presence of metal parts, a prototype of modern studs. The spikes improved the wheel's grip on the road, but the rubber itself continued to crack and burst in the cold.

The next step in the evolution of winter tires was taken by Metzeler. Its specialists, after a series of experiments, found an additive that allowed the rubber to remain elastic in the cold. This additive was silicic acid.

Meanwhile, a number of countries have banned the use of studded tires due to the fact that they have a negative impact on the road surface. Manufacturers have focused their efforts on creating tires with a special, “winter” tread pattern. Bridgestone was the first to offer studless winter tires to consumers in 1982.

Thus, we owe the emergence of modern winter tires not to any one brilliant inventor, but to the joint efforts of engineers from the world's leading tire manufacturers.

3. Tire service

It is carried out according to the same rules as summer tires. Make sure that the direction of rotation of the tires is observed during installation. Request the workshop staff to carefully balance the wheels. After installing winter tires, it would be a good idea to check and adjust the wheel alignment.

Inventor: Charles Goodyear
A country: USA
Time of invention: 1839

The Spanish conquistadors also brought wonderful products from South America (elastic balls, waterproof shoes). The Indians made them from the frozen milky juice of the Hevea tree. It was done simply. For example, to make a ball, they coated a round object with juice layer by layer as it hardened. When a sufficiently thick layer was obtained, the mold was removed. Waterproof shoes were made in a similar way, with one's own feet serving as the last. The inhabitants of Brazil called this material “caucho” (“cau” - wood, “uchu” - cry), and now it is known as rubber.

Serious attention was paid to rubber only after the French engineer from Cayenne, Francois Freycinet, delivered rubber, products made from it and a description from South America to the Paris Academy of Sciences. ways of its extraction. His note and samples fell into the hands of the explorer Charles Marie de la Condamine, who used these samples to shelter instruments from the rain. In 1751, Condamine reported a note from F. Freycinet to the Paris Academy of Sciences.

For a long time, rubber was used mainly to make soft toys; they tried to cover shoes with it to make them waterproof. They tried to use rubber for cart tires, but the material was very soft and easily rubbed off on the road surface. In addition, in the heat it became sticky, and in the cold it became brittle.

English chemist and inventor Charles Mackintosh (1766-1843) found a new use for rubber. He made a raincoat from two layers of material, knitted with a solution of rubber in petroleum hydrocarbons, and began producing waterproof coats, which were later named after him. In 1823 C. Mackintosh received a patent for this invention. But macintoshes also deteriorated at high and low temperatures, so the rubber industry experienced a period of decline.

Many researchers have tried to eliminate the disadvantages of rubber while maintaining its advantages, but to no avail. Finally, the American inventor Charles Goodyear succeeded.

Charles Goodyear (12/29/1800 - 7/1/1860) was born in New Haven, Connecticut. As a young man, he divided his time between the store, factory and farm of his father, who sold his own inventions, among other tools. In 1826, Charles and his father organized the first American specialized hardware store in Philadelphia; the business was unsuccessful: in 1830 the company went bankrupt.

The energetic young man took up inventing. In 1834, in a New York store window, he became interested in rubber products. Having learned that it was necessary to improve the heat resistance of this promising material, Goodyear, after a series of experiments, proposed adding magnesium and calcium oxides to rubber. He began making shoes from the resulting “gumm-elastic,” but in severe frost it behaved no better than ordinary rubber.

In 1836, the inventor learned to process rubber with nitric acid, bismuth and copper nitrates and received a patent on June 17, 1837, and then founded a factory in New York. However, things were not going well. Goodyear continued his experiments. In 1838, he acquired Hayward's patent, which consisted of mixing rubber with a sulfur solution.

But it was only in 1839 that Goodyear invented the method, which is now called vulcanization and became widespread throughout the world. This happened partly by accident when a sample of a mixture of rubber and sulfur left on a hot stove did not flow, but turned into the hard, charred material we know as rubber. The inventor devoted another five years to hard work on the technological process before patent No. 3633 appeared on June 15, 1844. However, the author could not make a profit from the patent, because he did not have the means to obtain its legal registration.

In 1841, Goodyear gave several pieces of rubber to an Englishman. These samples, which fell into the hands of the English chemist T. Hancock, helped him repeat the vulcanization technology and receive a British patent in 1843. The name of the process after the god Vulcan was also proposed by the English inventor.

Charles Goodyear tried to widely disseminate his invention, first in the USA, then in Europe, and spent a lot of money on exhibitions in London and Paris, the exposition of which included rubber products, right down to the pages of Goodyear’s own book. The inventor contributed to the development of the rubber industry in the Old and New Worlds, but he himself could not get rich. He joked that he could be recognized as a man dressed in all rubber and carrying a rubber wallet without a single cent. Goodyear died in poverty, leaving large debts. Only his son, also Charles, who continued his father’s work, managed to achieve success in the rubber business.

In 1846, A. Parks proposed the process of cold vulcanization using sulfur chloride. Rubber products at room temperature are placed in sulfur chloride dissolved in carbon disulfide, or in a chamber filled with sulfur chloride vapor. The process lasts 1-2 minutes, after which the remaining reagent is removed from the product. This method is used in the manufacture of thin-walled products (gloves, children's toys, etc.). Products obtained by cold vulcanization have worse properties than hot vulcanization products.

The developing industry needed more and more rubber. Huge Hevea plantations grew in South America and Indonesia. Around the same time, one enterprising Englishman secretly took 70 thousand Hevea seeds from Brazil, but they took root only in one place - on the Ceylon Islands, which then belonged to England.

Two large monopolists appeared on the world rubber market, and it became clear: natural rubber is not economical or profitable; it is necessary to discover a method for producing artificial rubber. The further history of the development of rubber is the history of chemical research, mainly of Russian chemical science.

In Russia, the rubber industry emerged in the first half of the 19th century. Before the revolution, rubber production was represented by four enterprises: “Triangle”, “Provodnik” and the relatively small plants “Bogatyr” and “Kauchuk”. In 1913, they employed 23 thousand people and produced mainly shoes.

Raw materials and equipment were foreign, technical management was carried out by foreigners. Few people know that the production of toilet sponge was the secret of the Triangle plant in the 19th century; Oddly enough, this simple item was the most competitive rubber product on the world market. After the October Revolution, the rubber industry was a fairly powerful industry. A general course towards industrialization was taken, and therefore the need for components for rubber products increased sharply.

But rubber production was exclusively dependent on the import of natural rubber. There were two possible solutions to the problem. The first is the search for rubber plants suitable for cultivation in areas with a temperate climate. In the USSR, N.I. did this. Vavilov, in the USA the initiators of this work were T. Edison and G. Ford.

The second option is to create synthetic rubber. Chemical studies of the composition of rubber began with the experiments of M. Faraday in 1826. In 1879, A. Bouchard observed the transformation of isoprene into a rubber-like mass, and in 1910 - I. L. Kondakov similar transformation of dimethylbutadiene. In 1909, Sergei Vasilyevich Lebedev showed a substance close to rubber, prepared from divinyl, a colorless volatile gas. But after much work, he managed to get only 19 grams.

In Russia, I. I. Ostromyslensky worked in the same direction, conducting experiments at the Bogatyr plant, in Germany - K. Harries, in England - F. Matthews and E. Strakhedge. Thus, science followed in the footsteps of nature: first it was necessary to obtain a polymer of diene hydrocarbons, and then synthesize rubber from them.

In 1926, the Soviet government announced a worldwide competition for the production of artificial rubber, Moreover, 3 conditions were put forward: 1) raw materials must be cheap; 2) quality is no worse than natural; 3) the period before presentation of development results is 2 years. In May 1928, this competition was won by S.V. Lebedev. As a raw material, he used ordinary potatoes, from which he obtained alcohol, and from alcohol - divinyl. Moreover, at first he received 5 grams of divinyl from 1 liter of alcohol, and two years later - 50 grams, thereby reducing costs by 10 times.

But this absolute breakthrough did not solve the problem, since, for example, it took 500 kg of potatoes to make one. Then scientists, having improved the invention of S.V. Lebedev, began to extract divinyl from natural gases. And already in 1929, the government decided to build in Leningrad a pilot plant for producing synthetic rubber from alcohol using the Lebedev method and two more plants that were supposed to test other well-known methods: B.V. Byzov and a group of scientists led by A.L. Klebansky .

On February 15, 1931, newspapers around the world reported that the first large batch of artificial rubber was produced in the USSR. Neither Germany nor England at that time were ready to offer their own solution to this industrial problem.

It is interesting that T. Edison in his interview assessed this event this way: “The news that the Soviets have achieved success in the production of synthetic rubber from oil is incredible. This cannot be done. I would even say more: this entire report is fake. Based on my own experience and the experience of others, it cannot now be said that the production of synthetic rubber will ever be successful." And yet, already in 1932, the first synthetic rubber plant produced products in Yaroslavl.