‘Holding your world together’

173 years ago, on 17 March 1845, the London-based manufacturer Stephen Perry was granted a patent for the production of elastic bands made from vulcanised natural rubber. Since then, he has been regarded as the inventor of the rubber band, although he built on the groundwork laid by one of his compatriots. To this day, the English-speaking world dominates the headlines when it comes to rubber bands: the world’s largest producer is based in the USA. And a world record relating to rubber bands was also set in the ‘Land of Opportunity’.

They bundle banknotes, letters and newspapers. They tie herbs into bouquets, and hair into plaits and ponytails. They prevent underpants from slipping down, ensure that preserving jars are sealed airtight, and have recently even come to be used as mounts for hard drives inside computer cases: Elastic bands of varying lengths and thicknesses, with the basic shape of a closed loop, reliably hold everyday objects together. Their versatility and ubiquitous presence make them seem almost as natural as an object found in nature, one that simply exists without anyone having to invent or manufacture it. This is also because rubber bands have been used as a matter of habit for many generations, and it has been almost 175 years since the patent for their manufacture was granted.
The first patent holder was the London-based manufacturer Stephen Perry, together with the engineer Thomas Barnabas Daft (1816–1878), who also worked in London. The British patent No. 13880, granted to the two men on 17 March 1845, concerned improvements to elastic cords (‘springs’) for straps, belts and bandages, as well as the manufacture of elastic bands. But how were these rubber rings – previously unknown – created? Quite simply: by cutting hollow rubber tubes into narrow strips, much like slices. Initially, these were still a long way from being a mass-produced item and served almost exclusively to bind loose sheets, newspapers and other paper products.

Perry is virtually forgotten today, overshadowed by more famous contemporaries such as Charles Nelson Goodyear (1800–1860) and Thomas Hancock (1786–1865), the discoverers of the vulcanisation of rubber, or Charles Macintosh (1766–1843), the maker of the first waterproof raincoat, impregnated with rubber. So who was this Stephen Perry, who has yet to find a biographer and of whom not even a photograph can be found on the World Wide Web? To begin with, he was the son of James Perry, who had founded a company in Manchester in 1824 specialising in the manufacture of writing instruments with steel nibs (‘steel pens’). These enjoyed a good reputation throughout Europe, so that ‘Perry Pen’ soon became an international synonym for ‘steel-nibbed pen’. Following James Perry’s death in 1843, his son Stephen took over the management of the firm and, after obtaining the aforementioned patent, expanded the business to include elastic bands, which soon became known as ‘Perry & Co’s Royal Aromatic Elastic Bands’. From then on, the company traded as ‘Messrs Perry and Co, Rubber Manufacturers of London’ and, in the rubber band business, first collaborated with Charles Macintosh & Co., Manchester, and later with William Warne & Co., Tottenham.
It was no coincidence that Stephen Perry had entered the rubber trade, as he was acquainted with Thomas Hancock, who is today regarded as the ‘father of the British rubber industry’. Perry did not intervene in Hancock’s priority dispute with the American Charles Goodyear concerning vulcanisation with his own patent (“we make no claim to the preparation of the india rubber”), but nevertheless benefited from this dispute. For, whilst embroiled in the energy-sapping and time-consuming controversy with Goodyear, Hancock failed to secure other rights.

In 1820, he had been granted his first rubber patent, which enabled him to incorporate fine rubber threads into textiles, thereby producing the precursors to today’s stretch fabrics. A process which, incidentally, can be traced back to the Moravian master tailor Johann Nepomuk Reithoffer (1781–1872). Hancock subsequently founded ‘James Lyne Hancock Ltd.’ in London under his brother’s name; the company served as a production facility for, amongst other things, elastic garters and elastic bands for boots. He sourced the raw rubber required for this from Brazil in the form of large lumps; processing these left behind considerable amounts of off-cuts that were no longer suitable for producing threads of sufficient length. To make the rubber scraps reusable, Hancock shredded them in a hand-cranked, enclosed hollow cylinder – and was quite astonished when, upon opening the apparatus, he found himself faced not with the expected small shreds but with a uniform, hot lump of rubber. The shredding had, in fact – as can be explained with the knowledge we have today – shortened the long molecular chains of the rubber particles – a process that takes place whilst generating a great deal of heat and increases the rubber’s plastic properties, so that, as Hancock observed, it much easier to shape and process. In 1821, the British inventor therefore replaced the hand-operated apparatus, which had a capacity of barely five kilograms, with a larger, horse-driven and internally heated kneading machine, which he called the ‘Masticator’ (the Latin word ‘masticare’ means ‘to chew’). Hancock gradually increased its capacity to 90 kilograms and processed the masticated rubber in his workshop into a wide variety of products.

As early as 1822, he was producing rubber hoses and tubes. It wasn’t long before he came up with the idea of cutting them into strips and rings. However, Hancock could not see any practical use for them, particularly as vulcanisation was still unknown and the rubber therefore – despite being chewed – remained an extremely unstable material that became hard and brittle on cold days and very soft on warm ones. No wonder, then, that Hancock decided against marketing his rubber bands; what is surprising, however, is that he was not far-sighted enough to secure the rights to them for the future, just as he had failed to do – presumably for reasons of secrecy – with the Masticator.

Stephen Perry stepped into this gap in 1845 with his patent application for elastic bands – with the crucial difference that these were now made of vulcanised rubber. In this respect, Perry, who died in 1873, does indeed deserve the credit for being the inventor of the rubber ring, even though – ironically – he had obtained the material licence from Hancock.

As is well known, it is only vulcanised rubber – that is, rubber mixed with sulphur – that produces the more elastic and durable rubber; a thermoplastic is transformed into an elastomer. This is based on a chemical cross-linking reaction: the linear polyisoprene chains in natural rubber are cross-linked with one another by the addition of sulphur, which forms bridges between them, a process facilitated by high temperature and pressure. Incidentally, to ensure they are particularly stretchy, rubber bands are still mostly made from natural rubber, even though synthetic versions have long been available, synthesised, for example, from butadiene and sodium (‘Buna’).

Preserving jar lids are also, in principle, made from vulcanised natural rubber, so that they are resistant to tearing and remain elastic for many years. The method of sealing glass jars containing preserved food was invented by the Gelsenkirchen-based chemist Rudolf Rempel (1859–1893). His patent from 1892 was later transferred to Johann Carl Weck (1841–1914), Rempel’s first major client, who founded the company J. Weck & Co. in Öflingen, Baden, on 1 January 1900. In 1907, the verb ‘einwecken’ was included in the Duden dictionary as a synonym for ‘einkochen’. Today, over 100 million preserving rings are purchased in Germany every year.

The rubber factories that manufacture them often also produce so-called bottle washers, which seal the swing top against the top of the bottle in beer and mineral water bottles. Another example of how, since Perry’s time, the rubber ring has realised its inherent potential and been put to further uses – be it in orthodontics to straighten teeth, or at school to shoot paper balls around.

The world’s largest producer today is the US-based Alliance Rubber Company, founded in 1923 by William Spencer (1891–1986) in Alliance, Ohio, who promoted the rubber band with the slogan ‘Holding your world together’. In 1944, a second factory was opened in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In 1957, Spencer patented a standardised rubber band he had developed, the ‘Open Ring’. According to the company’s own figures, it produced rubber rings with a total weight of 6.8 million kilograms in 2017. In 1999, the figure had been significantly higher at 11.6 million kilograms. The largest customer is the state-run postal service, the United States Postal Service (USPS).

Weighing no less than 4,100 kilograms, the world’s largest rubber band ball – standing two metres tall and with a circumference of 6.30 metres – earned Joel Waul from Lauderhill, Florida, a place in the Guinness Book of Records in November 2008. The then 27-year-old christened the monstrosity he had created ‘Megaton’; it is said to consist of over 700,000 intertwined rubber bands. This is an outrage not only from an environmental perspective, but also from an economic one: Stephen Perry would surely shake his head at the fact that we live in an age in which ‘l’art pour l’art’ justifies the senseless squandering of a valuable raw material.
M. Weber / G. Deussing