• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3134 0

one might say, except that the ball was never supposed to touch the ground and players could hit it only with their hips, chests, and thighs. Dressed in padded breechcloths and wrist protectors like thick fingerless mittens, the players knocked a fist-sized ball back and forth “with so much dexterity that it was marvelous to see,” Navagero reported, “sometimes throwing themselves completely on the ground to return the ball, and all of this done with great speed.”

As fascinating to Navagero as the ball game was the ball itself. European balls were typically made of leather and stuffed with wool or feathers. These were something different. They “bounded copiously,” Navagero said, ricocheting in a headlong way unlike anything he had seen before. The Indian balls, he guessed, were somehow made “from the pith of a wood that was very light.” Equally puzzled was Navagero’s friend Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, who saw a game at about the same time. When the Indian balls “touch the ground, even though lightly thrown, they spring into the air with the most incredible leaps,” d’Anghiera wrote. “I do not understand how these heavy balls are so elastic.”

The royal chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés fared little better. In his General and Natural History of the Indies (1535), the first official account of Spain’s foray into the Americas, he tried to describe bouncing, a term not then in the Spanish language: “These balls jump much more than our hollow balls—by far—because even if they are only let slip from the hand to the ground, they rise much further than they started, and they make a jump, and then another and another, and many more, decreasing in height by itself, like hollow balls but more so.” Indians made the strange, springy material of the balls, he wrote, by combining “tree roots and herbs and juices and a combination of things.… [A]fter [the mixture] is dried, it becomes rather spongy, not because it has holes or voids like a sponge, but because it becomes lighter, as if it were flabby and rather heavy.” Wait a minute, one wants to say: how could something “become lighter” yet be “rather heavy”?

Europeans like German artist Christoph Weiditz were fascinated by the native ballplayers who toured Spain in the 1520s—and by the rubber ball, which was unlike anything ever seen in Europe. (Photo credit 7.1)

Navagero, d’Anghiera, and Oviedo had a right to be confounded: they were encountering a novel form of matter. The balls were made of rubber. In chemical terms, rubber is an elastomer, so named because many elastomers can stretch and bounce. No Europeans had ever seen one before.

To engineers, elastomers are hugely useful. They have tucked rubber and rubber-like substances into every nook and crack of the home and workplace: tapes, insulation, raingear, adhesives, footwear, engine belts and O-rings, medical gloves and hoses, balloons and life preservers, tires on bicycles, automobiles, trucks, and airplanes, and thousands of other products. This didn’t happen immediately: careful studies of rubber didn’t occur until the 1740s. The first simple laboratory experiments, in 1805, gave little hint that rubber might be useful—although the scientist, John Gough, did discover the fact, key to later understanding, that rubber heats up when stretched.1 Only in the 1820s did rubber take off, with the invention of rubber galoshes.

Take off for Europeans and Americans, that is; South American Indians had been using rubber for centuries. They milked rubber trees by slashing thin, V-shaped cuts on the trunk; latex dripped from the point of the V into a cup, usually a hollowed-out gourd, mounted on the bark. In a process reminiscent of making taffy, Indians extracted rubber from the latex by slowly boiling and stretching it over an intensely smoky fire of palm nuts. When the rubber was ready, they worked it into stiff pipes, dishes, and other implements. Susanna Hecht, a UCLA geographer who has worked extensively in Amazonia, believes that native people also waterproofed their hats and cloaks by impregnating the cloth with rubber.