The United States produced only 8,000 tons of synthetic rubber, but production grew rapidly, reaching 800,000 tons annually by 1945. This undertaking would be described as the second-largest American engineering feat of the war, after the Manhattan Project. The feat was made possible by the German company IG Farben’s sale of the patent to the American company Standard Oil several years earlier (just before the outbreak of World War II), in the mistaken belief that the technical details were insufficient to develop industrial-scale production.
