Medieval Rubber

[Zor]

Many fantasy series have medieval Europeans type guys having access to Potatoes. I was wonder about what they could do with another New World plant.

Lets say we have a kingdom that is at a level of technological development comparable to 14th century Europe or Japan. However, that Kingdom is located in a tropical enviroment and cultivates Hevea brasiliensis, more commonly known as the Rubber Tree, for its sap. They have also worked out basic vulcanization.

How would they apply this substance?

Zor

[LaCroix]

1. Armor lining, probably...
2. Fashion

[Broomstick]

Waterproof boots.

Rain capes.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

rubber fashion in a tropical environment? One thing this lot are definitely going to need is an infallible cure for heatstroke

Hot and humid is not the best environment for the stuff, either. Apart from the extremely obvious, tyres and suspension for carts, padding for saddles, generally make travel easier and less boneshaking- but how mountainous are we talking about here? Brazilian pampas, or is this Andean- for that matter Japan basically is a mountain range, one reason wheels never really caught on until recently.

It's the tropical thing that worries me, because jokes aside, rubber doesn't breathe. Doesn't let water and air through. Given that, the cause of alchemy might be slightly advanced by flexible tubing, gaskets and pressure seals, and going back to rubber fashion anything such as inventing the wetsuit that might make you slightly more pirhana and- what's the proper name of the brazilian penis fish?- proof is worth more than mockery.

The other possibility that comes to mind is thin film washing other substances. Waterproofing that could help extend the lifespan and durability of tents, sails and cordage. Probably still not a good idea to go camping in the monsoon, but it would make the migratory nomadic lifestyle more practical. Or campaigning.

[madd0ct0r]

Don't forget being able to make better liquid holders then leather water bottles and barrels.

The oil from the seeds would probably make good lighting/cooking fuel, so all the uses olive oil was put to for example.

[Simon_Jester]

They may also be able to make a killing on the export market- rubber galoshes may not sell well here in tropicsland, but if they have any kind of long distance sea travel they'll sell quite well in other places.

[LaCroix]

They may also be able to make a killing on the export market- rubber galoshes may not sell well here in tropicsland, but if they have any kind of long distance sea travel they'll sell quite well in other places.

They will probably get a lot of killing imported into their market in return - in the form of colonisation.

If they are close enough to be able to trade such items, they are close enough for the same ships carrying an army on the return leg.

[Raw Shark]

Don't forget being able to make better liquid holders then leather water bottles and barrels.

Not to mention better liquid collection methods, such as giant waterproofed tarps gathering rainwater into rubber or rubber-coated barrels sealed with rubber or rubber-coated stoppers, which will seem like a good idea just for improving the taste even before they develop basic germ theory, and will probably cut things like dysentery back sharply if adopted on the mass scale, possibly leading to a local population boom if people keep breeding like they expect a lot of tropical epidemics and remain unmolested for a generation or two. If they keep the wonder substance under their hats for a while, and then veeery slowly leak a few carefully-selected exports that do not necessary appear to be connected, starting with just one awesome thing that can be rumored to be the product of well-nigh-on-magical secret procedures known only to one fanatical deafmute for a while, to make a shitload of money slowly over time, they might be able to outfit a huge and well-equipped defense militia if they're savvy enough to think of it before somebody thinks of invading them and taking their stuff; otherwise they're probably screwed.

[Formless]

Why are people assuming that a tropical civilization would have an inferior fighting force or martial culture than one from a more arid landscape? That certainly doesn't seem to have been the case historically in the tropical parts of southeast Asia, at least from my understanding. They would need access to decent iron deposits, certainly, but the thing that historically gave European empires their big advantage wasn't the climate of Europe, it was the technological advantages that they brought with them.

As for the rubber... *cough cough*

[Thanas]

It is the problem with access to iron deposits (and more importantly, the centuries and millennia of refining those techniques) which would probably doom a tropical force.

[Zor]

They may also be able to make a killing on the export market- rubber galoshes may not sell well here in tropicsland, but if they have any kind of long distance sea travel they'll sell quite well in other places.

They will probably get a lot of killing imported into their market in return - in the form of colonisation.

If they are close enough to be able to trade such items, they are close enough for the same ships carrying an army on the return leg.

Who said that these people were technologically backwards?

Zor

[Tony Stark]

I thought this thread was going to be about medieval condoms.

[Esquire]

So the actual question is "what can be done usefully with rubber at a medieval tech level," rather than "what would happen if rubber were a European/African plant in the 1400s?"

They'll sell a lot of rain coats and make better bottles than anybody else can. Probably other kingdoms will try to import rubber plants, as we saw historically with the British trying to get tea out of China, but I don't know if there would be any more wars over it than over any other valuable resource.

[Sea Skimmer]

Cost is a prime consideration, the medieval era was not just limited in technology, it was poor on average. Everywhere was, a natural result of an economy based near completely on human labor. Natural rubber requires vast plantations and huge amounts of labor to be harvested so it cannot be cheap in that context. This is part of the reason why use of rubber did not takeoff until late in the industrial revolution. Even then the early rubber boom was fairly heavily based on illegal slavery in Brazil and in some areas effectively a genocide of whatever was left of the amazon populations.

A raincoat might be an option for a noble, but most people are going to be sticking with the cheapest possible options which are likely to be oil skins. Rubber raincoats are pretty damn hot anyway, I'm not sure people would really want them in the tropics. The fact that untreated rubber, and hell even modern treated types which are mostly synthetic anyway, adds such a foul taste to liquids will also limit its use for storage container liners, though it might have a place as a seal some places. Overall I can't see this being a major change. Condoms, maybe, but I don't think early condoms were ever used much. Tended to be on the thick side, thus the shift to latex. Technology isn't just about discovery after all, its about application to drive it. Most rubber applications involve mass industrial production.

[Zaune]

It is the problem with access to iron deposits (and more importantly, the centuries and millennia of refining those techniques) which would probably doom a tropical force.

Assuming similar geology to Earth, yes. If the Random Number God or the God of Procedural Generation happened to drop a big deposit of iron ore in a mountain range surrounded by tropical rainforest, or even just contrived to put big deposits of tin and copper within a couple of hundred miles of each other, it might be a different story. Doubly so if they were to independently come up with gunpowder.

[Thanas]

I doubt that. It all comes down to opportunity and cost. Nobody is going to develop Iron unless they need to for it is a massive investment of resources. The only reason Europe developed it was because otherwise they would be dead. So you need to have similar empires who are in direct competition.

[Broomstick]

I question if the "massive investment of resources" for iron is really so much greater than for bronze (as an example). Any metal smelting/working is going to require significant resources and time to develop.

[Thanas]

I question if the "massive investment of resources" for iron is really so much greater than for bronze (as an example). Any metal smelting/working is going to require significant resources and time to develop.

Yes, it is much more massive. It took nearly a thousand years after Iron was introduced to get to weapons-grade steel and by that I mean "sword will not break on impact", certainly not the kind of steel you need to produce sophisticated weapons like rapiers. That took another 1500 years. Bronze is relatively easy to manufacture and to use, but steel? Whole other story.

[Elheru Aran]

The big issue with steel is temperature and carbon. You have to have a very hot furnace to melt the iron, a way to reliably introduce carbon in a controlled manner, and then industrial-level machinery to process and shape the steel. With bronze you just have to melt copper and tin together (copper and zinc make brass, but it's harder to get zinc than tin) and pour it into a mold. There, done (ish).

Steel requires serious equipment. Iron and bronze, far less so.

Mind you, doing up weapons and (to a lesser degree) armour is quite another matter. That's small-scale production and you can do it in a forge. This could be sufficient for the needs of this hypothetical tropical kingdom.

[Zaune]

Wrought iron does have one advantage over bronze, though; it doesn't involve importing one of the major components from a couple of thousand miles away.

[LaCroix]

Well, no. Iron and Bronze demand about the same technologies. The temperature requirements are about the same (I do both in my blacksmith shop)

The only thing that's different is how they are hardened. You see, for copper and bronze, after you melt and pour, (at about 1200° degrees), you use a hammer and anvil (stone and bronze were both used) on the cold piece to get it into the final shape (there are pieces in museums that still show the hammerwork). And both do harden under impact (work hardening), which is one reason why this was done - while you work the bronze blade cold, it gets harder and harder. Actually, it is becoming so hard that you have to perodically heat it to take out the stress and make it softer in order to continue working. Bronzesmiths refined the knowledge how to do this ever since the first copper piece was cast. The only thing they need to learn when to make bronze is excatly how much tin to add to make it better, but everything else stayed the same.

But iron doesn't do that. You can hammer a piece of steel until the dawn of time and achieve little hardening.

Also, until the late middle ages, iron ore wasn't actually melted, but welded. A bloomery (basically a huge chimney filled with ore and charcoal, and a bellow to stoke the fire) works by heating the iron ore to 1200-1250°C, at which point most impurites turn into molten slag. The remaining iron particles are white hot, and have the consistency of clay. When they touch other iron, they stick together, and also capture carbon from the surrounding atmosphere within that chimney. (This is very similar to the process of asteroids lumping together.)

At the end, the blomery is broken open, and after the slag has run off, you get a spongy lump of iron. This is kept hot and hammered into a bar, welding everything together. This bar is hammered flat, folded, reheated and welded together, again. This was usually done 10-20 times, a process called refining, done to even out the material and drive impurities out. (Yes, exactly like the japanese do. They just include the "making of iron stock material" in the "making of a blade", claiming it to be something special, while european countries had this done by someone else than the sword maker and always considered it an "of course this is done, it has to be done" thing. But this was done everywhere.)

The thing blacksmiths had to find out to improve iron(with carbon content) to "steel" were the following:

1. Find out that iron with above .3% carbon content can be made MUCH harder by making it hot (above 730°C - the point where it stops being magnetic) and then quenching it in water. That took a few centuries to become common knowledge.

(1.a. Find out that once you get above .7% carbon, you better use oil to quench, as it would break if quenched as quickly as water would. )

2. Find out that you need to reheat it a bit (usually 150-180°C) in order to take the stress out of it (Probably found out quickly - that was common practice for bronze), but that re-heating it to about 3-400° removes almost all the gained hardness. (At 730 degrees, it's back to plain iron strenght.)

3. Find out that you need to avoid certain impurities in iron like the plague. Sulfur, for example would make the piece break during work on the anvil if it was stuck (red heat-breaking), Phosphor would make it brittle. People had to learn to ad new coal slowly to the fire, let it burn off that stuff at the fire's edge and only then bring that coal into the actual fire.

Unless you know these (non-obvious) things, and the finer details, you simply can't do good steel. Took until about 1100AD to really master this.

The rest of the history of the sword is basically the sword always adapting to contemporary armor. A rapier would have been possible in 1300, but it would not have made sense in combat, then. I suggest "The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry", by R. Ewart Oakeshott if you are interested in the evolution of blades over time. A very thorough work spanning bronze age to late middle ages, and the basis for the modern understanding of blades.

[Zor]

I doubt that. It all comes down to opportunity and cost. Nobody is going to develop Iron unless they need to for it is a massive investment of resources. The only reason Europe developed it was because otherwise they would be dead. So you need to have similar empires who are in direct competition.

Well the Indians made plenty of use of iron and steel and India is in the tropics.

Zor

[Broomstick]

There was also iron technology in sub-Saharan Africa. I'm not clear how far back it goes but it does have a pedigree measured in centuries.

We'll leave the use of iron by Greenland Inuit as an anomaly - most cultures don't have an iron mega-meteorite easily accessible, although meteoric iron has been used as a starting point in the past in several places.

I guess it comes down in part to whether you're talking about one-offs and small scale iron working or what would be considered industrial scale. A village blacksmith working on a small scale can still produce all sorts of useful tools and objects, even if they aren't of a quality suitable for weapons. That, in turn, can have a significant impact on the economy and efficiency of a lot of other activities.

[Formless]

There was also iron technology in sub-Saharan Africa. I'm not clear how far back it goes but it does have a pedigree measured in centuries.

Are you thinking of Tanzania by any chance? Because according to wikipedia, the Haya people may have been working steel up to 2000 years ago according to anthropological and archeological evidence. That's long before Europeans mastered similar forging technologies.

[Broomstick]

That's likely them, the process I've heard about utilizes termite mounds but I'll be the first to admit I'm no expert on the details.