Tick-tock, tick-tock.
From cuts bored into the trunks of gutta-percha trees, sap seeped out at an exceedingly slow pace, flowing into coconut shells or bamboo bowls tied to the trunks.
The lumbermen waited for the sap to fill them, then collected it. Carrying Borneo axes and parang machetes, they risked attacks by venomous snakes and wild beasts to bring the sap out of the tropical rainforest.
Once exposed to air, this gutta-percha sap quickly hardened. Unlike gum arabic, it was sturdy and flexible. Locals often used it to make knife handles, whips, bottles, and other items. It was unsuitable for mixing into ink for writing and had no medicinal value, but a doctor's assistant in Singapore, William Montgomery, discovered a new use for it.
After being cleaned and roughly processed locally, the gutta-percha was folded into blocks and shipped to the docks. It was stuffed aboard cargo ships bound for the docks on Dock Road in Islington, London, then sent to nearby factories to be made into raincoats, umbrellas, canes, and substitutes for whalebone skirt hoops. Gutta-percha could be found among countless Victorian household items, such as brooches, picture frames, snuffboxes, and doorknobs. The material was practically everywhere; even golf balls were once called gutta balls.
People at the time could not get enough of this new material, which resisted salt and acid. Yet uses such as hearing aids, golf, skirt hoops, and cheap jewelry were not enough to let gutta-percha change the world.
Gutta-percha's waterproof nature and its resistance to deterioration in saltwater made it the ideal insulating material for cables. The Muggle government therefore conceived an ambitious plan: to lay a cable between the New World and Britain, allowing the two sides to communicate instantly by telegraph instead of exchanging messages by painfully slow ocean liners.
At first,