Courtesy of the United States Rubber Co.
The method of tapping is different, too. Instead of ten to thirty taps, a series of cuts the shape of a V is made on four sides of the tree, from the bottom up to as high as a man can reach, and a cup placed at the point of the V. Another way is to make one long cut down the tree and then cut out slanting channels about one foot apart into this, and put a cup at the bottom of the long cut; another is making a spiral around the tree with the cup at the bottom.
How is Rubber Cured on Modern Plantations?
With these big plantations some other way to cure the rubber had to be devised from the smoking process used in curing the native rubber which comes from South America. The milky juice is emptied from the cups into a tank and lime juice is added and it is then allowed to stand. The juice, as it comes from the tree, contains considerable water: the lime juice is added to separate the rubber from the water.
A Young Rubber Plantation
Courtesy of the United States Rubber Co.
Sometimes separators are used much like our cream separators; in fact, the whole process and the appearance of the interior of these rubber “dairies” very much resembles our own dairies where real milk is made into butter, curds or cheese.
Para, at the mouth of the Amazon, and Manaos, a thousand miles up, are both modern cities of more than one hundred thousand population. They have schools, churches, parks, gardens and museums, and, except for the Indians, certain peculiarities in architecture and the ever-present odor of rubber, they differ but little from our northern cities of equal size. Here the rubber markets are located and here the rubber is carefully examined, graded, boxed and shipped to New York or Liverpool.