REPORT OF MR. J. FRET WELL, JR.
403
manufacturer of vulcanite, H. C. Meyer, Jr., of Hamburg, whose lofty column of this material formed the most prominent of all the hard rubber exhibits, expressly states that his manufacture of this article originated in the purchase of Goodyear’s American patent in 1851, and the establishment of a factory at New York, the forerunner of that now carried on by the New York India-rubber Comb Company, at College Point.
The process of manufacturing this hard compound in India- rubber is too well known to need a long description here. The raw material is first cleansed from the impurities with which it is mixed in the process of collection, is then incorporated with sulphur, or other vulcanizing material, and subjected, under careful exclusion from the atmosphere, to a heat of from 270° to 310° Fahrenheit, being, while in a soft condition, rolled into sheets or pressed into moulds, whose form it retains after being vulcanized. By the addition of various pigments it can be colored, and samples of red, brown, yellow and mottled vulcanite were exhibited by H. C. Meyer, Jr., of Hamburg.
So far as the various processes of manufacture are concerned, the means of hardening the material, of giving it a permanent polish, and protecting it against atmospheric and solar influence, of coloring and working it, etc., nothing new' could be learned at Vienna. These processes are treated as secrets in Germany, and not, as here, published in the patent specifications.
The show-cases of H. C. Meyer, Jr., of Hamburg,gave a comprehensive view of all the purposes to which the hard rubber has hitherto been successfully applied.
The column itself, a homogenous cylinder of intensely black, highly polished vulcanite, was in itself an illustration of the extent to which the great technical difficulties connected with the manufacture of large masses of the material, hitherto employed almost exclusively for small articles, have been surmounted.
Other exhibits were patterns of vulcanite sheets of various colors used as veneers, and for the manufacture of combs, buttons, paper-knives, checks, eye-glass frames, counters, black piano-keys, knife-handles, whalebone substitute, etc. Iffit it was in the manufacture of moulded articles of irregular