Historian of science Londa Schiebinger tells us to look at instances of the “nontransfer of important bodies of knowledge from the New World into Europe” in order to reframe “questions about ‘how we know’ to include questions about what we do not know, and why not.”15 Her point is that, often, ignorance is not an absence, but an outcome of cultural and political struggles. This was the case here, played out in the realm of technical knowledge: while the colonizers did record the Aztec process for making rubber balls, including the use of juice from the Ipomoea alba species of morning glories in the processing of the latex, they failed to recognize the key role that this sulfur-rich liquid played in enabling rubber objects to hold their form across time and temperature.16 (It should be noted that practicalities also played a role; liquid latex did not travel well, and it had a strong odor, especially when exposed to heat.) But perhaps most importantly, the Europeans recognized neither the deep semantic power of the material nor its related economic value. For Mesoamerican societies, rubber was etymologically bound up with its extraction form—and with the body, power, pain, and magic. The indigenous names—which translate as “blood,” “tears of the tree,” “milk of tree”—figure rubber as a bodily fluid, one that requires some rip in the body’s skin or psyche before it can pour forth. As well as using it to make balls for their ritual games, these societies burned it as incense, used it for waterproofing and hafting weapons, and, in its liquid form, to mark the bodies of those about to be sacrificed to the gods. For the Aztec, it was a tribute material, demanded as payment from conquered peoples. But the conquistadors had arrived with a clear idea of what materials they wanted to amass: silver, gold, and other precious metals. In their scheme of things, rubber was neither sacred nor especially economically valuable, and ball games were not the kind of activity that warranted serious cultural representation. In Europe, sport was not sport as we know it, quite yet.

4.

The return to rubber occurred after the recentering of the Western world—after west of Rome was replaced by west of the prime meridian in Greenwich, and the sixteenth-century powers, now suddenly located in “the south,” were themselves rendered somewhat peripheral.During the long nineteenth century, the schoolboys, soldiers, sportsmen, botanists, bureaucrats, explorers, inventors, industrialists, and indentured laborers of the British Empire transformed rubber into one of the essential materials of the industrial revolution and laid the foundation for the landscape of global sport that we know today.

The British and American inventors who took up the material problem of rubber understood themselves as the inventors of a new technology; they were not interested in the Americas as a place from which to learn about bounce, but saw it simply as a site for the extraction of raw materials.18 It was the American Charles Goodyear who, after years of failed attempts and multiple bankruptcies, discovered (anew) the capacity of sulfur to cure rubber of its undesirable properties. But it was Englishman Thomas Hancock who won the race to the patent office by claiming the British patent in 1843, just months before Goodyear’s us claim in 1844. And it was Hancock who, in a gesture typical of his time, named the process of adding sulfur to cured latex at high temperatures vulcanization. The name had been suggested to him by his friend William Brockedon— painter, inventor, and author of books such as Italy, Classical, Historical, and Picturesque. Its adoption had predictable consequences. Invoking the Roman god of fire and technology to describe the process of using heat, mastication, and additives to cure rubber of its ills and make it a viable and desirable material further dislocated the technology from its origins in Mesoamerican society, papering over this history with a literally classical humanist reach back to Ancient Rome as the foundation of all modern knowledge.