Sulfur vulcanization in the processing and compounding of rubber by Hancock and his colleagues led to a more reliable process. Around 1900, disulfiram was introduced as a vulcanizing agent, and became widely used. In 1905 George Oenslager discovered that a derivative of aniline called thiocarbanilide accelerated the reaction of sulfur with rubber, leading to shorter cure times and reducing energy consumption. This breakthrough was almost as fundamental to the rubber industry as Goodyear's sulfur cure. Accelerators made the cure process faster, improved the reliability of the process and enabled vulcanization to be applied to synthetic polymers. One year after his discovery, Oenslager
Rubber toughening and the energy to break rubber particles could account for the increased energy absorption of toughened polymers. This theory was limited, only accounting for a small fraction of the observed increase in fracture energy. The matrix crazing theory focuses on explaining the toughening effects of crazing. Crazes start at the equator where principal strain is highest, propagate perpendicular to the stress, and end when they meet another particle. Crazes with perpendicular fibrils can eventually become a crack if the fibrils break. The volume expansion associated with small crazes distributed through a large volume compared to the small volume of a