Plastic Before Plastic: How Gutta-Percha Shaped the 19th Century

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

crescit_eundo

113 points

31 comments

worldhistory.substack.comSciencestory

calmpositive

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20/100

Gutta-PerchaHistory of MaterialsPlastics

Key topics

Gutta-Percha

History of Materials

Plastics

The article explores the history and uses of gutta-percha, a natural latex that was widely used in the 19th century, and the discussion highlights its various applications and its eventual replacement by synthetic polymers.

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12-18h

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Based on 31 loaded comments

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01Story posted
Aug 31, 2025 at 12:03 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Aug 31, 2025 at 2:33 PM EDT
2h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
10 comments in 12-18h
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Sep 3, 2025 at 1:00 AM EDT
4 months ago
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Discussion (31 comments)

Showing 31 comments

blululu

4 months ago

3 replies

I think your link is broken. Need to scroll past a more recent article on an incident of 19th century American history before the target article on botanicals and golf balls.

crescit_eundoAuthor

4 months ago

1 reply

I clicked again on the link I posted to make sure it’s correct (https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/plastic-before-plastic) and it brought me directly to the blog post without needing to scroll through anything else. Wondering where the link you clicked on dumped you into?

jonas21

4 months ago

1 reply

I think they just missed the segue from the intro (about the caning of Charles Sumner) to the body of the article (about gutta-percha).

The two are only tangentially related in that the cane happened to be made of gutta-percha, and its easy to miss the sentence where they mention this because it's sandwiched between a large image and a form to subscribe to the newsletter.

blululu

4 months ago

Yeah my bad. I saw the substack subscribe footer followed by the full Gutta Percha section and figured that it was a separate article. In my defense that was a very circuitous lead in.

yugioh3

4 months ago

Link works fine.

dmitrygr

4 months ago

Link worked correctly for me

WillAdams

4 months ago

1 reply

The link requires reading through the specifics of a violent event from U.S. history so as to pivot off the material used to make the device used as a weapon: gutta percha.

Perhaps the Wikipedia article would serve the discussion?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha

yugioh3

4 months ago

I think that's what makes this HN submission actually interesting. It underscores how this still relatively new material had become so quickly commodified, ubiquitous, and unremarkable that it played an unknown role in one of the most universally taught moments in US history.

userbinator

4 months ago

1 reply

Polymers supplanted and surpassed gutta-percha everywhere

Gutta-percha is a polymer. It's polyisoprene.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha#Chemistry

culi

4 months ago

2 replies

Gutta-percha (Palaquium gutta) is just rubber/latex, no? The Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) overtook it in popularity but it's basically the same natural latex that natural rubber is made from

EDIT: I see they are actually 1,4-polyisoprene but gutta-percha is in a trans configuration while H. brasiliensis latex is in a cis configuration. Not sure if that amounts to any difference in properties https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm

throwup238

4 months ago

1 reply

It amounts to a huge difference. Cis-polyisoprene has much better stretch and resilience, making it ideal for pneumatic tires. It sealed the economic fates of three continents at once.

DonHopkins

4 months ago

You're not allowed to say that on Twitter!

kevin_thibedeau

4 months ago

It doesn't have the same properties. It doesn't harden like rubber (before vulcanization was invented) and it is inert, thus immune to organic decay.

ChrisMarshallNY

4 months ago

1 reply

I've seen some pretty interesting stuff made from hardened peat (a Scottish friend of mine, used to make peat jewelry. I have a piece he made for me).

Vulcanized rubber was also quite plasticky.

culi

4 months ago

Rubber is made from (natural) latex. When that latex comes from Palaquium gutta we call it gutta-percha. Nowadays natural latex most commonly comes from Hevea brasiliensis but it's the same thing

jvm___

4 months ago

3 replies

Wikipedia says gutta-percha was a household word as it was a popular material to make items out of. Interesting to see the word distribution in Google books, it was super popular but seems to have died off quickly.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Gutta-percha&y...

buildsjets

4 months ago

1 reply

Do you REALLY believe that there was a hundred-fold spike in the use of the term gutta-percha in the 5 years between 1869 and 1874, or would you willing to consider that you are looking at spurious data?

WillAdams

4 months ago

Consider a similar new material/technology development --- certainly from 1969--1974 there was presumably a similar spike in the use of the word "computer", which was similarly transformative.

sorokod

4 months ago

The dash in the spelling is unusual (according to books.google), also different languages tell different stories

Russian - looks like a hot topic at the start of WW2 :

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%D0%B3%D1%83%D...

German:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Guttapercha&ye...

culi

4 months ago

At some point we started calling it latex instead. There's still plenty of stuff made from natural latex. The harvesting of latex from Hevea brasiliensis is almost exactly the same as harvesting latex from Palaquium gutta (gutta-percha)

gkanai

4 months ago

1 reply

I remember reading about Gutta Percha in Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board.

"Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William Thomson predicted that it was going to be hard (proportional to the length of the cable squared).... The two men got into a public argument, which became extremely important in 1858 when the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid such a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and wrapped in iron wires."

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/07/neal_stephenson.html

fennecbutt

4 months ago

Also, the victorian Internet.

kragen

4 months ago

1 reply

Probably almost everyone reading this article has pieces of gutta percha in their bodies, because it remains the filler material of choice for dental root canals.

porridgeraisin

4 months ago

1 reply

Almost everyone reading this would have had a root canal procedure done?

kragen

4 months ago

I had estimated upwards of 90% given that the article is targeted at English-speaking adults, but https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/iej.13822 suggests that I may have overestimated—across Europe only 60% of people had had a root canal, with less variation between countries than I had expected.

So maybe only 75% of the people reading the article have gutta percha in their mouths.

perilunar

4 months ago

2 replies

Not the only "plastic before plastic". There was also shellac, celluloid, cellophane, and a few others. Bakelite, the first 'fully-synthetic' plastic, dates from the early 1900s.

jaclaz

4 months ago

Add to the list galalith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galalith

dddw

4 months ago

Zinc also can be considered plastic of it's age, super maluable.

dvh

4 months ago

European spindle (brush) also contains this resin

ftio

4 months ago

Until today, my only awareness of the term “gutta percha” was as a type of golf ball, as noted in the article. I’ve always assumed it was someone’s name, or else a nickname for a design. What a cool material!

contingencies

4 months ago

The species has apparently very limited modern distribution: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=427301

Not much better for the genus: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...

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