Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MATERIALS 411
rubber industry—generally acknowledged the outstanding national accom-
plishment of World War IL
Until the war, synthetic rubber in this country remained a laboratory
curiosity.124 No one, not even Dupont with its experimental Neoprene, be-
lieved large-scale production feasible. New technical research and stark
necessity were to make it so.
Following a visit by Lawrence A. Wood and Norman P. Bekkedahl of
the rubber section to the maj or German synthetic rubber research laboratory
at Leverkusen in 1938, the Bureau prepared a circular based on their obser-
vations and on the published literature available.125 Widely called for after
the defeat of France, the circular went through further reprintings as the
rubber-producing areas of the British, Dutch, and French in the South Pa-
cific fell before the Japanese advance.
In February 1942 leaders in the petroleum and chemical industries
were brought together. They agreed to pooi their patents and trade secrets
and undertake operation of the synthetic rubber plants that the Government
proposed to finance. The initial goal of the plants was set at 400,000 tons
a year, a deliberately optimistic figure although it was far below the 900,000
tons of natural rubber consumed in 1941, most of it to make the automobile
tires on which the American public had come to depend for locomotion.126
Until the war, the raw materials of experimental synthetic rubbers
came largely from organic chemicals, manufactured gas, and byproducts of
the coking industry. Militating against these rubbers was the production of
their components. Neoprene, for. example, though it had excellent resistance
to oil, required huge quantities of chlorine, and chlorine was in chronic short
supply. What made the new industry possible were the synthetics derived
from petroleum and, to a ]esser degree, the distilling industry's grain alco-
hols.127 These synthetics were butyl rubber, well adapted for gas masks, bar-
rage balloons, and inner tubes, and Buna N and Buna S, tougher rubbers
suitable for tire casings. After considerable experimenting and testing, ma-
'24For early Bureau interest in the possibilities of synthetic rubber, see letter, GKB to
J. M. Morris, MIT, Feb. 4, 1926 (NBS Box 173, ISR).
C427, "Synthetic rubbers: a review of their composition, properties, and uses"
(Wood, 1940). Although synthetic rubber cost three to four times as much as natural
rubber, by 1940 Germany and Russia, seeking self-sufficiency, had gone over wholly to
the synthetic. Experimental in this country but in most cases in production abroad
(under other names) were Dupont's Neoprene, a chloroprene polymer; the German Buna
rubbers, from butadiene derived from the cracking of petroleum; Thiokol, an organic
polysuiphide made by the Thiokol Corp. in this country; Vistanex, Standard Oil's
isobutane polymer, from petroleum; and Koroseal, Goodrich's vinyl chloride polymer.
128 Jones, Fifty Billion Dollars, pp. 399, 406.
127 Butadiene from alcohol cost cents per pound in 1945, from petroleum 10—14 cents.
Hearings * * * 1949 (Jan 20, 1948), p. 546.