Amazon Rainforest Tours and Travel | Rubber, the Amazon's Tree of Fortune
Thousands of tree and shrub species produce latex but none in such profusion as the Para rubber tree, native to the Amazon. A member of the spurge family, the tree grows to 150 feet in the rainforest flood regions, propagated by catapulting the seeds contained in its nut a distance of some sixty-five feet when it cracks open. These high-protein high-fat seeds are carried still further in the digestive tracts of fruit-eating fish such as the huge tambaqui species that feeds in flooded forests during the region's rainy period. The tree species takes root when the waters recede.
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Working at night, rubber tappers extract latex by carving a spiral-shape in a thin layer of the bark. Until it heals over, this temporary wound oozes latex into a collection cup attached to the trunk by the tapper. Trees produce sap for twenty-five to thirty years after which they are harvested for the manufacture of high-quality rubberwood furniture. Visitors on Amazon tours may go into the rainforest to see how rubber is tapped.
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Archeologists have found evidence of rubber products dating back to pre-Columbian times. Over centuries, the substance was formed into balls for games played by indigenous civilizations, as well as used in making shoes and waterproofed garments. It was while illustrating his landmark treatise on the history of electricity, that 18th century English clergyman and chemist Joseph Priestly realized that this elastic substance could remove pencil marks from paper. The word “rubber” was coined.
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The consistency of natural rubber is affected by temperature. Its commercial uses remained limited until 1839 when American inventor Charles Goodyear figured out how to vulcanize the substance by infusing it with lead and sulfur. As demand for rubber expanded, processing plants began springing up in such unlikely places as Paris.
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Once the Industrial Revolution got into full swing in Europe and the United States, rubber production boomed.
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For almost four decades, the Amazon rainforest enjoyed a monopoly position in rubber. Overnight, a class of colonial rubber barons emerged who used their new wealth to build elegant mansions in the rainforest. Enjoying the good life, they threw money around, and left the unlikely civic legacy of Teatro Amazonas, a salmon-pink 640-seat opera house in the port town of Manaus, Brazil on the banks of the Rio Negro.
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As quickly as the Amazon had become an industrial powerhouse, the international market for its product began to evaporate. Though the Brazilian government instituted capital punishment as the penalty for exporting the rubber tree or its seeds, progress could not be stopped. English explorer, Henry Wickham, smuggled the prized seeds out of Brazil in 1876 and brought them back to London where they were germinated in the greenhouses of the Kew Gardens. Transported to the British colonies of the Far East, the imported seeds allowed Ceylon to get a foothold in the rubber business, filling its defunct coffee plantations with the new crop. The Amazon's disorganized growing conditions in the wild and government regulatory mismanagement proved no contest for the systematic growing techniques of its Malaysian competitors. Plantation-style propagation of the rubber tree species failed in the Amazon due to endemic leaf blight, but other climates proved more hospitable, and over the next two decades, plantations spread across Asia.
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Amazonian production reached its peak in 1912 when Brazil's export of crude rubber topped 41,000 tons. By 1919, annual world production had reached 350,000 tons. The burgeoning automotive industry created an insatiable demand for rubber that spawned more innovation. Synthetic rubber using petroleum was perfected in the 1940s, dealing Amazonian rubber its final blow. Though the industry was briefly invigorated during World War II by the decimation of the Asian rubber industry and increased US demand, the revival was short-lived.
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Today, most natural rubber comes from the Far East. With synthetic rubber now comprising 60% of worldwide rubber production, Amazon rainforest countries have been forced to look to other extraction industries as well as agriculture and eco-travel to employ its Amazon citizens. Some mansions still remain in the rainforest, monuments to the moment in time when prosperity belonged to the Amazon.
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