Plastic Before Plastic
How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
Most American students learn in high school about the 1856 “caning” of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks. Teachers love the incident because it serves as a tidy encapsulation of so many themes from that period of American history.
The attack stemmed, like so many problems in the 1850s, from the dispute over slavery. Sumner was a fi…
