From his travels to the New World, Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), the renowned Italian navigator and frst-class pioneer, brought rubber from Central America with him to Europe. Because the raw rubber was sticky and not very durable, however, no great importance was attached to testing its technical usefulness.
This changed after Charles Nelson Goodyear produced natural rubber in 1839 by adding sulphur and under the influence of heat. The result was vulcanized, durable, elastic rubber, which attracted interest for many applications due to its useful properties. The burgeoning automotive industry, for example, developed an almost insatiable hunger for rubber.
Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, Germany was cut off from the supply of natural rubber. Without rubber, mobilization was unthinkable. The solution came from a laboratory at Farbenwerke in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, the parent plant of the later Bayer Group. In 1909, after years of research, the chemist Friedrich Hofmann succeeded in synthesizing methyl rubber there. Although the process proved to be unproftable, it ensured the supply of the required elastic material. In 1926 Walter Bock and Eduard Tschukur, two students of Friedrich Hofmann, finally succeeded in the industrial production of styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR). In 2012, 5.4 million tons of SBR were processed worldwide.
