With wartime demand for rubber high and the supply of natural rubber drying up, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration invested $700 million in 51 new plants designed to make synthetic rubber from petroleum byproducts. Scientists had experimented with synthetic rubber as early as the 19th century, but large-scale production had never taken off in the United States. The government had to act fast, and on a huge scale. In 1942, however, Japan seized both of these regions, effectively cutting off the US supply of natural rubber. Normally, the rubber for these items would have come from the latex produced by millions of rubber trees growing mainly in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) and the Malay Peninsula. In addition, each person in the military received about 32 pounds of rubber footwear, clothing, and equipment. Building a military airplane required about 1,000 pounds of rubber, a tank needed about 2,000 pounds, and a battleship required about 75 tons. Rubber, for example, was a vital material that was needed in enormous quantities. Some of the new inventions helped the United States find the strategic goods necessary for fighting the war. Many of these innovations transformed the very nature of warfare for future generations and also had a significant impact on the lives of civilians as well. In response, scientists, technicians, and inventors supplied a steady stream of new products that helped make victory possible. At every turn Americans seemed to need more of everything-more supplies, bigger bombs, faster airplanes, better medical treatments, and more precise communications. That sentiment was definitely the case during World War II, a massive global conflict that presented the United States with a variety of tactical and logistical challenges. There’s an old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Top Image: Library of Congress, LC-USW3-003728-D.
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