Rubber Stamping

 

Little to the knowledge of a French scientist by the name of Charles Marie de la Condamine that a sample of Indian rubber he forwarded to the Institute de France in 1736, would turn out to be phenomenal. However before the event, explorers from Spain noticed that tribal natives from South America had a great time frolicking with a sticky substance that was already capable of stamping. They became curious but it did not motivate their scientific instinct to feed their inquisition of what would be called rubber stamping today. 

 

There were some individuals in the past who discovered that rubber can be employed well as an epoxy agent especially, when they tried to attach feathers to their skin. Another incident proved the hunch when the fond-of-tattooing Antipas utilized the soot of the burnt hydrocarbon polymer. Patting, stamping and piercing were done in order for them to achieve a desired cosmetic aftermath. One publication that was issued in June 1918 wrote that “rubber stamping was created a hundred years ago by tribal natives from South America for the printing of bodily patterns.”

 

Thirty- four years after, Charles Marie de la Condamine sent a package of how-to-care-for-rubber to his home which the founder of oxygen, Joseph Priestly, saw. He was noted to say that he was able to witness an element having the ability to exceptionally adapt to the aim of wiping from a sheet the smear of a black lead pencil. By 1770, the novel idea of “peaux de negres” which is wiping pencil smears with tiny cubes of hydrocarbon polymer, was born. Since the new approach was expensive, people still continued to erase errors with bread crumbs instead.

 

When the news about the dilemma reached the ears of Charles Goodyear, he was obsessed on how to provide solution which at that period was not yet acknowledged as rubber stamping. He was actually identified as the “crackpot of epic proportions” all throughout his years of existence. He left his hardware business and proceeded to work on the problem in the kitchen. Spending how many hours combining weird brews of hydrocarbon polymer with salt, castor oil, pepper and many others, his mundane life was exhausted in countless experiments where in the long run, he was imprisoned for failure to pay the debts incurred.

 

In 1839, while Charles Goodyear was doing his usual activities in the kitchen, he accidentally placed some rubber blended with sulfur above a steaming stove. He thought that it would change into a sticky clutter but he was wrong. As a matter of fact, the “unresolved matter” in the scullery was still flexible the following day. The process was then labeled as vulcanization which opened doors for countless practical applications that lead to stamping. By 1860, he passed away leaving the whole world a legacy of what is now rubber stamping.