As far back as 1600 B.C., Mesoamerican peoples in Mexico and Central America were using liquid rubber for medicines, in rituals, and to paint. It was not until the conquest of America that the use of rubber reached the western World. Christopher Columbus was responsible for finding rubber in the early 1490s. Natives from Haiti played football with a ball made of rubber, and later, in 1615, Fray Juan de Torquemada wrote about indigenous and Spanish settlers of South America wearing shoes, clothing and hats made by dipping cloth into latex, making these items stronger and waterproof. But rubber had some problems: it became sticky in response to warm weather and it hardened and cracked with cold weather.
One century later, in 1734, Charles Marie de la Condamine went to South America on a trip. There, he found two different trees containing latex: Hevea brasiliensis and Castilla elastica, but only the first became important as a natural rubber source. The reason why the Hevea tree succeeded over the Castilla tree was the way its latex was transported along the trunk.

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