I’ve just been exposed to natural rubber and I wasn’t expecting it to be that sticky and smelly.
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You put it in nearly boiling, but not quite boiling sulfur and that changes the molecular structure. This discovery revolutionized the rubber industry and lead to indescribable human rights abuses in the Congo
Useable rubber is a polymer – a bunch of very long string-like molecules, made up of repeating units. For rubber, this unit is 1,4-polyisoprene.
The sap of a rubber tree, called latex, contains 1,4-polyisoprene floating around in water and oils, along with a lot of other junk. By adding acid to the sap, we can make the 1,4-polyisoprene form longer and longer chains and come out of the sap, leaving all that unwanted stuff behind (particularly after repeated chemical cleaning).
Most rubber is then vulcanized – heat-treated with sulfur to create more bonds between the polymer strands, using bits of sulfur as connecting blocks. This makes it more durable, more flexible, and less susceptible to getting broken down by sunlight and oxygen.
The process is called ‘vulcanization’ and it is one of the major technical advancements that makes modern life possible as before vulcanized rubber it is was hard to water seal. You could do it with wood and tar but rubber gaskets are like magic.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/materials-science/vulcanization#:~:text=Vulcanization%20is%20a%20chemical%20process,viscosity%2C%20hardness%20and%20weather%20resistance](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/materials-science/vulcanization#:~:text=Vulcanization%20is%20a%20chemical%20process,viscosity%2C%20hardness%20and%20weather%20resistance).
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