Hans Christian Meyer – called “Stockmeyer” – made walking sticks. His starting materials were whalebone, bamboo, sugar cane and later rubber. Soon, ivory knobs were also part of Stockmeyer’s product range. The entrepreneur was a pioneer not only in the use of novel, “exotic” materials from overseas. In 1837, he was one of the first major industrialists in Hamburg to use steam engines and provided health insurance for his workforce.

With the advent of synthetic products, natural rubber (caoutchouc) lost its economic importance. The German Empire became the leader in the development of plastics. It had fewer colonies than its rivals and thus also fewer raw materials to process. Germany´s  chemical industry sought to compensate for this shortage.

The British naturalist and biopirate Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 rubber seeds from Amazonia to London. At Kew Gardens, the botanical gardens in London, he succeeded in raising 2,000 seedlings. These seedlings were transferred to British plantations in Southeast Asia and Africa. In this way, England was able to secure its industrial demand for rubber.

Before the British cultivated rubber trees in Southeast Asia, natural rubber mostly came from the Amazon. In a telling contrast to the realities of rubber production, the poster shows a small indigenous family going about their work in an almost bourgeois, idyllic manner.

The traditional Hamburg company “Hercules Sägemann” emerged from a subsidiary of H.C. Meyer (“Stockmeyer“). The foundation owed itself to chance. Experiments with hard rubber, a new material at the time, proved its particular suitability for combs. And so the Meyers founded their own comb factory. Even today, Hercules Sägemann still manufactures combs made of natural rubber, which have no cast seams and are particularly elastic. They are very popular with the African hair community, as evidenced by numerous YouTube tutorials.

A new invention was presented at the first World Exhibition in London: industrially produced furniture and everyday objects made of rubber. This ornamental excess was a thorn in the side of the architect and art theorist Gottfried Semper, who advocated “material-appropriate” design:

“An important natural material has only recently brought about a kind of revolution in the whole wide field of industry, due to its strange flexibility, with which it lends itself to all purposes. I am referring to gum elasticum or rubber, as it is called in Indian, whose stylistic field is the widest that can be conceived, since its almost unlimited sphere of action is imitation. This material is, as it were, the monkey among the useful materials….With such a material, a stylist’s mind stands still!” (Gottfried Semper: Der Kautschuk das Factotum der Industrie, in: ders.: der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten. Or practical aesthetics. A handbook for technicians, artists and art lovers, 1860).

Direct communication between Europe and the USA was made possible by a copper cable that ran under the Atlantic Ocean. It was protected from the salt water by a triple layer of insulation made of gutta – a type of latex that originated in Malaysia.

The traditional Hamburg company “Hercules Sägemann” emerged from a subsidiary of H.C. Meyer (“Stockmeyer”). The foundation owed itself to chance. Experiments with hard rubber, a new material at the time, proved its particular suitability for combs. And so the Meyers founded their own comb factory. Even today, Hercules Sägemann still manufactures combs made of natural rubber, which have no cast seams and are particularly elastic. They are very popular with the Black community, as evidenced by numerous YouTube tutorials.