Without rubber, the modern world as we know it would not exist, from car tires to gaskets, and much else. Today, the world consumes more than 66 billion tons of natural and synthetic rubber yearly, the equivalent of about 2.65 billion car tires. Rubber made extraordinary fortunes, indeed the basis of some of the world’s most powerful companies: Firestone, Goodyear, Pirelli, and Michelin are household names. In this illustration, stockbrokers rush to buy and sell shares as quickly as possible. The rubber boom (and bust) was an early twentieth-century equivalent of today’s Silicon Valley.