February 1987
Pages stretched and contracts when a loaded sample is heated. Cough interpreted his results in a rather fanciful way. For instance, the contraction of a stressed rubber specimen on heating "is occasioned by the absorption of caloric fluid in the same manner that ropes are obliged to contract by absorption of water." Yet, the phenomena he described were real and it took more than a century to formulate their interpretation. The second choice might be Furaday's analysis of rubber latex in 1826.'41 He showed that the aqueous phase contains protein and he gave a reasonably accurate figure for the elemental composition of the rubber. It is little known that he also recorded in his notebook an experiment in which he heated rubber with sulfur. All he observed was hydrogen sulfide generation and he concluded that heating organic compounds with sulfur might be a novel way to reduce their hydrogen content!"] This may surely be regarded as one of the great missed opportunities in the history of science! My third choice is the 1839 report by Simon, a Berlin pharmacist, who first isolated styrene from a natural resin and noted that styrene distillation left a residue whose amount increased with the time the styrene was stored.[61 H e assumed that the product was styrene oxide. A few years later, Simon's experiment was repeated by Blyth and Hofmann"' who showed conclusively that no oxidation was involved. To determine the nature of the transformation, they nitrated the styrene and the residue remaining after distillation and characterized them by the N/C ratio. They reported that this ratio changed from 118 to 1/7 and concluded that the original substance, C8H8, had been transformed into C7H,.
3. The Origin of the Term Polymer
The origin of the term "polymer" is rather curious. It was the result of the isolation, by Faraday, of butene for which he found a gas density twice as high as that of ethy-