Materials and the Environment Timeline

We had to choose two compounds to research in greater detail this semester from the timelines on page 3 of Materials and the Environment. I would like to know more about synthetic rubber and teflon/PTFE.

Synthetic Rubber came into prominence in 1922, just after the First World War and before the Great Depression. A major reason for its' rise over natural rubber was the blight of Brazilian rubber trees in the ten years before the rise of natural rubber. Another reason was burgeoning Communist Power Russia, who had decided to reduce dependence on Britain for resources, and therefore, they made synthetic rubber from petroleum in one project and from ethyl alcohol in the other. Finally, the First World War demonstrated that the massive war machines were going to need new sources of rubber, and it couldn't all be natural. America refused to buy British rubber after the Stevenson Act, and so DuPont finished up production of synthetic rubber for the States. Synthetic Rubber is man-made that is based of elastomers in a polymer group. Pictured is a roll of synthetic rubber sheets.

PTFE/Teflon was developed in 1943. PTFE is short form for polytetrafluoroethylene, a compound that DuPont created for nonstick surfaces. The compound posted is PTFE. It's also highly unreactive due to the strong "carbon-fluorine bonds." It was used in uranium enrichment plants in teh 1940s, and it is also used in pipes due to its' highly noncorrosive nature.