Amazonian Rubber: The Spectacular Rise and Even Faster Fall

For thousands of years, the Amazon basin was full of trees that bled a strange white sap. It was a curiosity — it bounced, it stretched, it was waterproof — but it melted in summer heat and cracked in winter cold, which made it essentially useless. Then, in 1844, Charles Goodyear figured out how to make it stable, and suddenly the world had a material it desperately needed: bicycle tires, automobile tires, telegraph wire insulation, industrial gaskets. Modern life, as it turned out, ran on rubber.

Within decades, the only place on earth with enough rubber trees to meet demand was hundreds of miles deep in the Amazon jungle. The money that flowed out of that jungle was so staggering that the city of Manaus — carved out of the rainforest in the middle of nowhere — built one of the most opulent opera houses in the world. Italian marble. Parisian chandeliers. Tiles shipped from Alsace. Enrico Caruso performed there while the men harvesting the rubber died of malaria and debt an hour upstream.

Twenty years later, it was abandoned and left to rot. This is the story of how that happens.