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Rubber Stamp – Seven Stories to Stamp into your Storybook

The origin and evolution of the Rubber stamp is connected to many different objects among many different cultures. Here are a few stories about the rubber stamp that you most probably didn’t know.

The invention of the rubber stamp has been credited right back to the tattooing practices of the Mayans! This ancient South American civilization is believed to have practiced the art of using the rubber stamp to mark sacred images on both men and women before they were sacrificed to their gods. The Stamp Trade News, July 1918 edition, made a reference to this, though the story has never been verified.

The vulcanization process that allows the quality of stickiness to be removed from rubber and make it flexible, invented by Charles Goodyear, got its name from Vulcan, the Roman God of fire. It was discovered after an accident while Goodyear was fooling around in his kitchen! What followed afterwards was a true test of patience since Goodyear had to survive many years  of hardship and near destitution before finally bringing rubber to the worldwide commodity level that it enjoys today.

The modern day Rubber stamp has the unusual historical association of being inspired from some of the first dentures! Rubber used to be a replacement material for dentists when dentures could not be made with metals like gold or wood. One of these pioneering dentists had a nephew, a Mr. James Woodruff, who saw the potential of rubber for different applications and later started using it for making rubber stamps for the postal service of the United States of America.

In 1736, Charles Marie de la Condamine, the French scientist and explorer, is believed to have sent from the Amazon area a sample of “India” rubber to Paris. Even in his wildest of dreams he wouldn’t have imagined seeing that rubber evolving into such a universal material with so many uses!

In 1866 a man carved some words and phrases, mainly of a derogatory nature about his family, on a flat piece of rubber and mounted it on a wooden block. Later, the imprint from this 4″ x 6″ rubber stamp was widely reported appearing on bath tubs.

Normally people think of the rubber stamp as soon as they hear the word “stamp”. But the truth is that before 1864, when the word “stamp” was used to denote a stamping device, it wasn’t a rubber one! That was the metal printing stamp, which was also called the hand stamp, which was used widely, some six to eight years before the rubber stamp was invented.

The name of the inventor of the rubber stamp is still a mystery, since there are quite a few contenders to take the credit. It may have been used for the first time by L.F. Witherell of Illinois, James Woodruff of New York or even Henry Lee of Massachusetts. Who knows? Maybe they all started using the rubber stamp.

So next time you take a rubber stamp in your hand, remember that this object reached its present condition after many evolutions and changes. If it wasn’t for the efforts of people like Charles Goodyear, perhaps we would still be using the heavier metal stamps today. Life would have been so much messier and harder work than it already is.

Read more about http://solidstamps.co.uk/rubber-stamps

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