It's too bad that no one had a wax cylinder on hand back then. Or one of the new, modern sound-recording machines created by the inventor and Hanover native Emile Berliner a few years earlier. "We'll take the stuff, as much as you can supply!" — those words would have earned a place of honor in the corporate archives of LANXESS. That's because they were uttered at the beginning of a technical evolution that extends from 1909 directly to the present day. And they have to do with synthetic rubber. And with tires, of course.

Naturally, no one knows today for certain whether that was precisely what was said. But it's likely that similar words actually were spoken at the advent of the modern material rubber. What is known for certain is that the reactors of synthetic rubber inventor Fritz Hofmann in Elberfeld had not even cooled off before the first samples of his new, artificial rubber raw material ended up on the workbenches of the tire developers. These samples raised quite a few eyebrows among the experts with the stiff collars. The gentlemen were so impressed that they had the first auto tires made of Hofmann's methyl rubber molded as early as 1910 in the workshops of Continental Caoutchouc und Guttapercha Compagnie in Hanover.