Synthetic Rubber

Synthetic rubber is an artificial elastomer synthesized from petroleum byproducts rather than harvested from the sap of rubber trees, valued in applications such as tires, seals and hoses for its thermal stability and resistance to oils. Fritz Hofmann's team at Bayer's Elberfeld laboratory in Germany produced the first synthetic rubber by polymerizing isoprene in 1909, and following theoretical work published independently in 1930 by Sergey Lebedev, Wallace Carothers and Hermann Staudinger, chemists under E. K. Bolton at DuPont developed neoprene in 1931, one of the first commercially successful synthetic rubbers, prized for its heat and chemical resistance. Further variants followed quickly, including the Buna copolymer rubbers developed by German chemists and Waldo Semon's Koroseal, both in 1935, establishing synthetic rubber as a major industrial material well before natural rubber supplies were disrupted in the Second World War.