Polymer science be considered polymer science in the modern sense. In the 1840s, Friedrich Ludersdorf and Nathaniel Hayward independently discovered that adding sulfur to raw natural rubber (polyisoprene) helped prevent the material from becoming sticky. In 1844 Charles Goodyear received a U.S. patent for vulcanizing natural rubber with sulfur and heat. Thomas Hancock had received a patent for the same process in the UK the year before. This process strengthened natural rubber and prevented it from melting with heat without losing flexibility. This made practical products such as waterproofed articles possible. It also facilitated practical manufacture of such rubberized materials. Vulcanized rubber
Rubber toughening to 30 percent showed a negative linear relationship with the brittle-tough transition temperature, after which the toughness decreased. This suggests that the toughening effect of adding rubber particles is limited to a critical concentration. This is examined further in a study on PMMA from 1998; using SAXS to analyze crazing density, it was found that crazing density increases and yield stress decreases until the critical point when the relationship flips. A material that is expected to fail by crazing is more likely to benefit from larger particles than a shear prone material, which would benefit from a smaller particle. In