Today, natural rubber constitutes less than half of the rubber on the market; the rest is rubber that is produced synthetically by means of chemical processes that were partly known in the 19th century but were not applied commercially until the second half of the 20th century, after World War II.

The origins of synthetic elastomers can be traced to the first half of the 19th century, when attempts were made to elucidate the composition and structure of natural rubber with the eventual goal of reproducing the material. In 1838 the German F.C. Himly obtained a volatile distillate from the substance, and in 1860 the Englishman C. Greville Williams broke down rubber by distillation into three parts--oil, tar, and "spirit"--this last part being the more volatile fraction and the main constituent, which Williams named isoprene. The Frenchman Georges Bouchardat, with the aid of hydrogen chloride gas and prolonged distillation, converted isoprene to a rubberlike substance in 1875, and in 1882 another Briton, W.A. Tilden, produced isoprene by the destructive distillation of turpentine. Tilden also assigned isoprene the structural formula CH2=C(CH3)-CH=CH2.

The efforts outlined above were attempts to replicate natural rubber. It was only when the search for chemical equivalence to natural rubber was abandoned, and comparable physical properties were emphasized, that synthetic rubber came into being. The choice fell upon butadiene (CH2=CH-CH=CH2), a compound similar to isoprene, as the basis for a synthetic product. Developed due to shortages of natural rubber (particularly in war-time), Synthetic rubbers have proliferated over the years, and there are now very many polymer types, all of which have advantages for performing different tasks.