The history of hospitality is based on the history of Economy
Rubber - the Driver of Economy in SE-Asia
The global rubber boom of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century lead to an unprecedented growth of economy, and to the development of a number of great colonial hotels (Malaya: Raffles in Singapore and Eastern&Oriental Hotel in Penang, Metropole in Hanoi and Strand in Rangoon = Yangon as well as hotels in Dutch Indonesia).
The success of the economy of South East Asia was mainly based on British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonial efforts to find the best suitable use of the foreign soil. One of the various options was imported: Rubber.
Where did rubber come from?
India rubber or Caoutchouc
The first mention of this material on record was made over five hundred years ago by the historian Herrera. On the second voyage of Columbus he observed that the inhabitants of Haiti played a game with balls made from ‘the gum of a tree’.
In 1615 the rubber tree as the source of a new material was first mentioned (‘there is a tree which the Mexican Indians call Ulequahuitl. This tree yields a white milky substance, thick and gummy and in great abundance.’ The Spaniards who conquered the Indians of Central and South America even used this juice to waterproof cloaks.
All these facts, however, did not attract the western ‘old’ world. It was the French government which scientifically discovered rubber. The first accurate information concerning caoutchouc trees was furnished by La Condamine, who was sent by the Parisian government in 1735 to measure an arc of the meridian near Quito. In 1751 the researches of M. Fresnau, an engineer residing in Guyana, were published by the French Academy.
In 1755 M. Aublet described the species yielding Caoutchouc in French Guinea. Nevertheless India rubber, as it was called by then, remained widely unknown in Europe. The British scientist Joseph Priestley observed a curiosity in the mid 18th century, when he called public attention to it as a novelty for erasing pencil marks, and stated that it was sold in cubic pieces of 1/2 inch for 3s. each.
For our story, it is interesting to know that India rubber was not known as a product of Asia until 1798, when a plant, afterwards named Urceola elastica, was discovered to yield it by Mr J. Howison, a surgeon of Prince of Wales Island (today Penang). Again it took until the middle of the 19th century to slowly develop a rubber industry.
In 1870 Europe and America had more than 150 factories each employing 400 to 500 operatives and consuming more than 10,000,000 lbs of caoutchouc.
In 1887, John Boyd Dunlop (February 5, 1840 – October 23, 1921, he had his own veterinarian practice in Ireland), born in Scotland, developed the first practical pneumatic or inflatable tyre for his son's tricycle, tested it, and patented it on December 7, 1888. However, two years after he was granted the patent Dunlop was officially informed that it was invalid as Scottish inventor Robert William Thomson (1822 - 1873), had patented the idea in France in 1846 and in the US in 1847. Dunlop’s development of the pneumatic tyre arrived at a crucial time in the development of road transport. Commercial production began in late 1890 in Belfast. Dunlop assigned his patent to William Harvey Du Cros, in return for 1,500 shares in the resultant company and in the end did not make any great fortune by his invention. Dunlop died in Dublin, and is buried in Deans Grange Cemetery.
Henry Nicholas ‘Rubber’ Ridley, farsighted botanist and director of the Straits Settlements Botanical Gardens, Singapore (1888–1911), eventually founded the rubber tapping industry in 1895. He developed the whole-herring-bone tapping method, but almost failed to find local planters in Malaya to grow this new species. Malaya eventually became the world’s largest grower and producer of rubber with 40 million trees by 1910.
The French supplies were primarily covered by French Guyana. Long before Indo-China started to supply its share of the worlds’ market, rubber came from South and Central America, Africa and Asia (Assam, Borneo, Java, Penang, Rangoon and Singapore).
In 1898 the brothers Edouard and André Michelin founded the tyre company Michelin et Cie in Clermont-Ferrand. It was also the year of birth of Bibendum, the famous Michelin puppet.
(from our book HOTEL METROPOLE HANOI, by Andreas Augustin)
