Until the 1870's, all rubber came from wild trees in the rainforests of the Amazon. With the development of the rubber tire for bicycles, then for automobiles, the demand for rubber skyrocketed. Brazilian producers were making fortunes, but could not keep up with the world demand. New sources of rubber were being sought.

In 1878, Sir Henry Wickham, a British naturalist, stole 75,000 seeds of the wild rubber tree, Hevea braziliensis, while exploring in the Amazon. He took 22 of the surviving seedlings to the equatorial belt of South-East Asia where, by 1904, the first rubber plantations were established. Wickham was knighted then, for his illegal activities.

Rubber is produced as liquid latex in sacs called laticifers in the phloem (inner bark) of the tree. The latex is released and collected by 'tapping' - a process which involves cutting the bark, and collecting the latex that drips out.

When enough latex has been collected, formic or acetic acid is added to induce coagulation. In the past, and presently in some small communities, the process of making rubber was done by hand - gelatinous latex was flattened, rolled into sheets and hung to dry. Now, bulk latex is first treated with ammonia (an alkali) to prevent coagulation until it is shipped to processing plants where rubber is made in large amounts by machinery.

Early on in the commercialization of rubber, the British devised ways to obtain maximum yields from their trees, surpassing Brazil's production and making their plantations in Southeast Asia the most productive in the world. These strategies included the development of high-yielding, double-grafted plants and the maximization of the flow of latex by unclogging the laticifers through successive removal of bark tissue