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Comment by jvm___ | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia says gutta-percha was a household word as it was a popular material to make items out of. Interesting to see the word distribution in Google books, it was super popular but seems to have died off quickly.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Gutta-percha&y...

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The dash in the spelling is unusual (according to books.google), also different languages tell different stories

Russian - looks like a hot topic at the start of WW2 :

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%D0%B3%D1%83%D...

German:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Guttapercha&ye...

At some point we started calling it latex instead. There's still plenty of stuff made from natural latex. The harvesting of latex from Hevea brasiliensis is almost exactly the same as harvesting latex from Palaquium gutta (gutta-percha)

EDIT: I see they are actually 1,4-polyisoprene but gutta-percha is in a trans configuration while H. brasiliensis latex is in a cis configuration. Not sure if that amounts to any difference in properties https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm

Do you REALLY believe that there was a hundred-fold spike in the use of the term gutta-percha in the 5 years between 1869 and 1874, or would you willing to consider that you are looking at spurious data?

Consider a similar new material/technology development --- certainly from 1969--1974 there was presumably a similar spike in the use of the word "computer", which was similarly transformative.

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