I 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."
Wikipedia 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.
Until 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!
dvh 9 hours ago [-]
European spindle (brush) also contains this resin
blululu 9 hours ago [-]
I 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 9 hours ago [-]
I clicked again on the link I posted to make sure it’s correct (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 7 hours ago [-]
I 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 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah 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 9 hours ago [-]
Link worked correctly for me
ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago [-]
I'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.
WillAdams 9 hours ago [-]
The 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?
"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
Gutta-percha is a polymer. It's polyisoprene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha#Chemistry
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Gutta-percha&y...
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.
Vulcanized rubber was also quite plasticky.
Perhaps the Wikipedia article would serve the discussion?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha
Not much better for the genus: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...