A Rubber band  (in some regions known as a binder, an elastic or elastic band, a lackey band, laggy band or gum band) is a short length of rubber and latex tube which was ground and cooked at high temperature, is used to hold multiple objects together. The rubber band was patented in England on March 17^th, 1845 by Stephen Perry. Most rubber bands are manufactured by natural rubber. Rubber bands come in a variety of sizes and colors....

Rubber bands are one of the most convenient products of the twentieth century, used by numerous individuals and industries for a wide variety of purposes. The largest consumer of rubber bands in the world is the U.S. Post Office, which orders millions of pounds a year to use in sorting and delivering piles of mail. The newspaper industry also uses massive quantities of rubber bands to keep individual newspapers rolled or folded together before home delivery. Yet another large consumer is the agricultural products industry. The flower industry buys rubber bands to hold together bouquets or uses delicate bands around the petals of flowers (especially tulips) to keep them from opening in transit. Vegetables such as celery are frequently bunched together with rubber bands, and the plastic coverings over berries, broccoli, and cauliflower are often secured with rubber bands. All in all, more than 30 million pounds of rubber bands are sold in the United States alone each year.

Rubber, which derives from plants that grow best in an equatorial climate, was first discovered by European explorers in the Americas, where Christopher Columbus encountered Mayan indians using water-proof shoes and bottles made from the substance. Intrigued, he carried several Mayan rubber items on his return voyage to Europe. Over the next several hundred years, other European explorers followed suit. The word rubber was born in 1770, when an English chemist named Joseph Priestley discovered that hardened pieces of rubber would rub out pencil marks. By the late eighteenth century, European scientists had discovered that dissolving rubber in turpentine produced a liquid that could be used to waterproof cloth.

However, until the beginning of the 19th century, natural rubber presented several technical challenges. While it clearly had the potential for useful development, no one was able to get it to the point where it could be used commercially. Rubber rapidly became dry and brittle during cold European winters. Worse, it became soft and sticky when warn.

The American inventor Charles Goodyear had been experimenting with methods to refine natural rubber for nearly a decade before an accident enabled him to overcome these problems with unprocessed rubber. One day in 1839, Goodyear accidentally left a piece of raw rubber on top of a warm stove, along with some sulfur and lead. On discovering his "mistake," Goodyear delightedly realized that the rubber had acquired a much more usable consistency and texture. Over the next five years, he perfected the process of converting natural rubber into a usable commodity. This process, which Goodyear dubbed vulcanization after the Roman god of fire, enabled the modern rubber industry to develop.

The first rubber band was developed in 1843, when an Englishman named Thomas Hancock sliced up a rubber bottle made by some New World Indians. Although these first rubber bands were adapted as garters and waistbands, their usefulness was limited because they were unvulcanized. Hancock himself never vulcanized his invention, but he did advance the rubber industry by developing the masticator machine, a forerunner of the modern rubber milling machine used to manufacture rubber bands as well as other rubber products. In 1845, Hancock's countryman Thomas Perry patented the rubber band and opened the first rubber-band factory. With the combined contributions of Goodyear, Hancock, and Perry, manufacturing effective rubber bands became possible

In the late nineteenth century, British rubber manufacturers began to foster the development of rubber plantations in British colonies like Malaya and Ceylon. Rubber plantations thrived in the warm climate of Southeast Asia, and the European rubber industry thrived as well, because now it could avoid the expense of importing rubber from the Americas, which lay beyond Britain's political and economic control.