Mounted Rubber Stamps

Facts About Rubber Stamps

Enter Charles Goodyear. Upon hearing of the unsolvable rubber dilemma (from the Roxbury Rubber Company), Goodyear became obsessed with solving the whole sticky question once and for all. During his lifetime, Goodyear was judged to be a crackpot of epic proportions. Leaving his hardware company, he began working on the problem in his wife's pantry, spending hours mixing up bizarre brews of rubber and castor oil, rubber and pepper, rubber and salt, rubber and heaven knows what. Daily life intruded on his experiments in the form of recurring bankruptcy and sporadic imprisonment for failure to pay his loans. At one point, Goodyear actually sold his childrens' school books for the cash required to embark on the next experiment. Goodyear's persistence and single-mindedness were legion. In 1839 while fooling around in a pantry, Goodyear accidentally dropped some rubber mixed with sulfur on top of a hot stove.

Prior to 1860, hand stamps enjoyed limited use. Their heyday commences with the Civil War. The union financed the war by issuing revenue stamps which were required on virtually all company papers of any kind -- notes, drafts, bills, checks, etc. The government required that the revenue stamps be 'cancelled' with a notation of the date and the name of the person cancelling them. Clearly this procedure was a real pain. It was tedious and slow and begged for some type of technology to come to the rescue. It isn't difficult to imagine the instant popularity with which the first mechanical hand stamps were met.

At that time virtually all identification marking was made with brass or copper stencils and stain. The pump company was experiencing problems with stain running under stencils and creating blotches on the pumps. Witherell decided to try cutting stencils out of thin sheets of rubber packing. It was while cutting letters out of a sheet of rubber, and watching the letters fall at his feet, that his brainstorm hit. He promptly cut more letters out of thicker rubber, glued them to a piece of old bedpost, inked the creation on a leather ink pad, rolled the bedpost over a pump and made a good impression of his own initials.

Perhaps as early as 1864, and no later than early 1866, James Woodruff visited a shop that manufactured patent washtubs where he observed the names and other identifying information being printed on the tubs with a curved wooded block which had rubber letters mounted on it.

Help was just around the corner in the person of his uncle Urial Woodruff. A dentist, Uncle Urial was very familiar with rubber, vulcanisers, and the practicalities of dealing with both. Additional experiments with a regular dental vulcaniser and Uncle Urial's advice and cooperation netted some good-quality stamps. Shortly after he established the factory, the Dental Rubber Syndicate demanded that Witherell pay a ten dollars per pound royalty, in addition to the three dollars per pound he was already paying for the flesh-colored dental rubber.

With the new equipment set up, James Orton ordered in a supply of fresh, new type and prepared to set his plant in motion. The mounts for his stamps were made of black walnut in nearby Seneca Falls, New York. He personally went to pick up the first batch.

It wasn't until a boom in the 1990's that rubber stamping became so popular with millions of crafter's worldwide. As thousands of companies begin to produce rubber stamps, the availability and unique designs became common everywhere!

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