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 viable option for practical applications in architecture and car manufacturing as a substitute for glass when high transparency is necessary. Incorporating a rubber filler phase increases the toughness. Such fillers need to form strong interfacial bonds with the PMMA matrix. In applications where optical transparency is important, measures must be taken to limit light scattering. It is common in toughening PMMA, and in other composites, to synthesize core-shell particles via atom-transfer radical-polymerization that have an outer polymer layer that has properties similar to those of the primary phase that increases the particle’s adhesion to the matrix. Developing PMMA compatible core-shell