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Leopold profited from the ivory of the resource-rich Congo and even more from its rubber, a primary product of the Congo. Rubber vines grew throughout central Africa; but harvesting rubber from a vine was more difficult than that from a tree. So prices for African rubber went up, and Asian producers of less expensive rubber gained market share.
King Leopold II, whose rule of the Congo Free State was marked by severe atrocities, violence and major population decline.. Even before his accession to the throne of Belgium in 1865, the future king Leopold II began lobbying leading Belgian politicians to create a colonial empire in the Far East or in Africa, which would expand and enhance Belgian prestige. [2]
Rubber revenue went directly to Leopold who paid the Free State for the high costs of exploitation. [41] The same rules applied as in the Domaine Privé. [36] In 1896 global demand for rubber soared. From that year onwards, the Congolese rubber sector started to generate vast sums of money at an immense cost for the local population. [42]
The book was intended as an exposé of the situation in the so-called Congo Free State (labelled a "rubber regime" by Conan Doyle), an area occupied and designated as the personal property of Leopold II of Belgium and where the serious human rights abuses were occurring. Indigenous people in the region were being brutally exploited and tortured ...
Charles Goodyear (December 29, 1800 – July 1, 1860) was an American self-taught chemist [1] [2] and manufacturing engineer who developed vulcanized rubber, for which he received patent number 3633 from the United States Patent Office on June 15, 1844.
In the case of silicone, organic rubber surrounds very finely divided silica dust (up to 380 m 2 of combined surface area of all the dust particles per gram of this dust [citation needed]). When the organic rubber is exposed to fire, it burns to ash and leaves behind the silica dust with which the product started.
Other names for this vine are eta, the white rubber vine and the Congo rubber plant. [2] Congo rubber was a commercial rubber exported from the Congo Free State starting in 1890, most notable for its forced harvesting under conditions of great human suffering, in the Congo Free State , detailed in the 1904 Casement Report . [ 3 ]
Butyl rubber is more resistant but still has a small number of double bonds in its chains, so attack is possible. Exposed surfaces are attacked first, the density of cracks varying with ozone gas concentration. The higher the concentration, the greater the number of cracks formed.