The so called "Rubber
Crisis" of the 1920s presented Americans with a dramatic warning of
their dependence on foreign suppliers. World War I had already taught the
lesson that tropical materials might become out of reach during wartime,
and by the 1920s, desires for technological and consumer goods made the next
potential crisis only more ominous. As demand for tires and other rubber
products skyrocketed, foreign suppliers raised their prices, disease threatened
tropical sources, and many Americans expressed xenophobic fears of allowing
other nations to control this valuable commodity.
In this context, several prominent Americans turned toward domestically grown
alternative rubber crops as an alternative. With financial support from Henry
Ford and Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison devoted the last four years of his
life to a study of thousands of weeds, vines, and other plants before eventually
identifying the goldenrod as a promising potential source for America's wartime
rubber needs. Another contingent, whose supporters include Herbert Hoover,
Bernard Baruch, and Major Dwight D.
Eisenhower, focused on the possibilities of a desert shrub, the guayule.
The paper will introduce the political economy of this debate, and then focus
especially on the investigative styles that stood behind the various researchers'
approaches and assumptions. Thomas Edison's notebooks reveal his well-known
and determined empiricism;
they are filled with daily accounts of hypotheses, discoveries, and failures.
His trial-and-error methodology, however, was increasingly inappropriate
for a difficult research problem that required expertise in botany, chemistry,
plant breeding, pest control, machine design, patent law, and countless other
hurdles, especially when each trial required nearly one year's time to be
completed. Following Edison's death in 1931, his successor on the goldenrod
project initiated a dramatically different research model that revealed a
much different set of assumptions. The guayule supporters, meanwhile, questioned
many of Edison's assumptions. By focusing on a single crop, they developed
a more a systematic, (though hardly more profitable), approach to the problems.
In the 1940s, when war again threatened Americans' demand rubber, only those
who proposed artificial and industrial processes could dream to solve the
problem.
Carroll Pursell, Alan Marcus and other historians of technology have addressed
the topic of "chemurgy," a movement of 1920s and 1930s rooted in
efforts uncover industrial uses for agricultural products. This paper will
add the case study of domestic rubber crops to this history, and examine
fundamental tensions that arise when models appropriate for one form of technological
investigation face the realties of another. In brief, it is story of conflicts
over the inventive process. The paper will be based almost exclusively upon
primary source materials, including papers and notebooks of Edison, Baruch,
Hoover, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Agriculture.