I later learned that it was Harvey Firestone, the tire magnate, who had brought the tree from India and given it to Edison in the hopes that its milky latex would soon provide a domestic source of natural rubber on the US mainland. Edison analyzed more than seventeen thousand latex-producing species for their potential as sources of natural rubber. The research was funded in part by Firestone and Henry Ford, both of whom were troubled by the rubber monopolies held by the British and Dutch in the early twentieth century. The inventor found that more than a thousand of these species produced
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