Vulcanized Play: Three Stories of Dunlop

• In Event: Science, Technology and Sport - I: Sporting Technologies and Narratives

Abstract

This paper begins with a furious tweet directed at Dunlop Sport by an Egyptian squash player in 2013. Raneem El Welily was chasing the world title and the bounce of the ball that she had trained her play around for two decades had become suddenly wildly unpredictable. Taking this badly bouncing rubber ball as an “object to think with” (Turkle 2007), I follow it into the overlapping histories of John Boyd Dunlop (the inventor of the pneumatic tire and co-founder of Dunlop Rubber), the Dunlop Rubber Company (for a time British Empire’s largest landowner and sports manufacturer), and Dunlop Sport (the brand now owned by Sumitomo Rubber). I argue that modern sport is a form of vulcanized play—a phrase aims to capture the relationship between rubber, sport, science and technology by tying the history of play, and especially the formation we think of as modern sport, to the industrial and imperial projects that structure the production of truer (better, more reliable) forms of buffer and bounce. True bounce was and continues to be achieved through standards and specifications, well-secured global supply chains, and dramatically unequal systems of labor and distribution. Squash balls are small things—minor players in the ongoing story of globalization—but here I ask them to stand in for all of the balls used in physical and virtual games played around the world. These ubiquitous objects connect our everyday gestures to situated and global histories of play, spectacle, and the persistence of imperial power.

Author

• Carlin Wing, Scripps College