Central and South America. First balls made of vegetable rubber. When Christopher Columbus first saw them on the island of Hispaniola in 1492 AD, he judged them to be much superior to the air-filled ones used in Spain for ball games. Columbus brought back samples of rubber balls to Europe, but they remained a curiosity for a long time. They were made of latex, produced, for example, by the Ficus elastica (rubber tree) or Hevea brasiliensis. Natural rubber is a polymer of the isoprene molecule. The first chemical experiments on isoprene were conducted by Michael Faraday, and in 1826 the chemical formula for rubber was established: a multiple of C5H8. Another form was gutta-percha from the Palaquium tree of Malaysia, used to coat submarine cables and also for golf balls (a gutta-percha core wrapped in a layer of rubber and covered with more gutta-percha).
