Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century

Here's a summary of the themes from the Hacker News discussion:

Accessibility and Initial Reception of the Article

The discussion began with a minor issue regarding the accessibility of the linked article on Substack. Some users initially had trouble reaching the main content due to what they perceived as a long or circuitous introduction, mistaking parts of the lead-in for separate articles or the newsletter subscription form.

• "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." - blululu
• "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." - jonas21
• "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." - blululu
• "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." - WillAdams

However, others clarified that the link worked fine for them.

• "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?" - crescit_eundo
• "Link worked correctly for me" - dmitrygr
• "Link works fine." - yugioh3

Gutta-Percha as an Early "Plastic" and its Chemical Nature

A significant portion of the conversation focused on the chemical properties and classification of gutta-percha, particularly in relation to modern plastics and rubber. Users debated whether it qualified as a polymer and its relationship to other natural latexes.

• "Gutta-percha is a polymer. It's polyisoprene." - userbinator
• "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" - culi
• "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" - culi
• "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." - throwup238
• "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)" - culi

The discussion also touched upon other historical materials that could be considered "plastics before plastic."

• "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." - perilunar

Historical Significance and Ubiquity of Gutta-Percha

Users highlighted the surprising ubiquity and historical importance of gutta-percha, noting its role in various applications, from early technology to everyday items, and its presence in historical discourse.

• "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." - yugioh3
• "European spindle (brush) also contains this resin" - dvh
• "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." - jvm___
• "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.'" - gkanai
• "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!" - ftio

Modern Relevance and Applications of Gutta-Percha

A surprising modern relevance of gutta-percha emerged, with users pointing out its continued use in dentistry, leading to speculation about its prevalence in the general population.

• "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." - kragen
• "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." - kragen

Linguistic and Data Interpretation of Term Usage

The discussion included observations on the historical usage of the term "gutta-percha," with users referencing Google Ngrams data and questioning potential spikes or anomalies, as well as noting variations in spelling and usage across different languages.

• "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 :" - sorokod
• "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?" - buildsjets