Gutta Percha Company

The Gutta Percha Company was an English company formed in 1845 to make a variety of products from the recently introduced natural rubber gutta-percha. Unlike other natural rubbers, this material was thermoplastic allowing it to be easily moulded. Nothing else like it was available to manufacturing until well into the twentieth century when synthetic plastics were developed.^[1]

Gutta-percha proved to be an ideal insulator for submarine telegraph cables. The company started making this type of cable in 1848 and it rapidly became their main product, on which it had a near monopoly. The world's first international telegraph connection under the sea, a link from Dover to Calais in 1851, used a cable made by the company. Except for a few early ones, submarine cables were armoured with iron, then later steel, wires.^[2] The Gutta Percha Company made only the insulated cores, not the complete cable, until April 1864 when it merged into the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, which was later acquired by British Insulated Callender's Cables in 1959.^[3]