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3,500 Years of Rubber When Europeans arrived in the New World, they observed the people of Mesoamerica (Mexico today) using a material that was naturally waterproof, elastic, tough, adhesive, and the coolest property of all... it bounced. With the later discovery of electricity, it even made for a great electrical insulator (pretty neat, huh?).                       This substance which came from a local tree that produced a sap which formed into a natural latex. They called it called "ōlli", which in Nahuatl (an indigenous language in central Mexico if you're wondering) means rubber, or latex, which has...

Ask for slippers, zories, thongs, or clam diggers, you may be surprised that these are words not referring to house shoes, underwear, or a tool for locating clams. In fact, they all refer to what most of America, the UK, and Canada call "flip flops". If you're wondering, in Hawaii, they're known as slippers, as zories in some places on the East Coast, thongs in Australia, and clam diggers in Texas. Australians may also call them pluggers, or double pluggers, and New Zealand they're known as jandals (Japanese sandals). In South Africa they're plakkies, slip slops or just slops, in the Philippines they're tsinelas, and in India and Pakistan, they're chappals. In the South Pacific, they're called go-aheads (kinda...