<P> The Pará rubber tree is indigenous to South America . Charles Marie de La Condamine is credited with introducing samples of rubber to the Académie Royale des Sciences of France in 1736 . In 1751, he presented a paper by François Fresneau to the Académie (published in 1755) that described many of rubber's properties . This has been referred to as the first scientific paper on rubber . In England, Joseph Priestley, in 1770, observed that a piece of the material was extremely good for rubbing off pencil marks on paper, hence the name "rubber". It slowly made its way around England . In 1764 François Fresnau discovered that turpentine was a rubber solvent . Giovanni Fabbroni is credited with the discovery of naphtha as a rubber solvent in 1779 . </P> <P> South America remained the main source of the limited amounts of latex rubber used during much of the 19th century . The trade was heavily protected and exporting seeds from Brazil was a capital offense, although no law prohibited it . Nevertheless, in 1876, Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Pará rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to Kew Gardens, England . Only 2,400 of these germinated . Seedlings were then sent to India, British Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Singapore, and British Malaya . Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) was later to become the biggest producer of rubber . In the early 1900s, the Congo Free State in Africa was also a significant source of natural rubber latex, mostly gathered by forced labor . Liberia and Nigeria started production . </P> <P> In India, commercial cultivation was introduced by British planters, although the experimental efforts to grow rubber on a commercial scale were initiated as early as 1873 at the Calcutta Botanical Gardens . The first commercial Hevea plantations were established at Thattekadu in Kerala in 1902 . In later years the plantation expanded to Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India . India today is the world's 3rd largest producer and 4th largest consumer . </P> <P> In Singapore and Malaya, commercial production was heavily promoted by Sir Henry Nicholas Ridley, who served as the first Scientific Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens from 1888 to 1911 . He distributed rubber seeds to many planters and developed the first technique for tapping trees for latex without causing serious harm to the tree . Because of his fervent promotion of this crop, he is popularly remembered by the nickname "Mad Ridley". </P>

The greatest amount of sap collected from any one tree is