Gutta Percha

John H. Verrill

October 4, 2025

A cane made of gutta percha material was used in the attack on the anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of Congress by pro-slavery Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina in 1856

Recently I had a dental procedure to repair a broken tooth. The dentist noted that the tooth had had a root canal in the past and he had to remove some of the fill that had been placed in the tooth. He said the fill was made of gutta percha. Now I had heard the term before as I have had a number of root canal operations and had been told that the fill material was gutta percha, that being said, I had no idea of what the material was composed. Naturally I consulted the internet first with a Google search. I found most references were to the material used in the dental industry for filling the spaces in the tooth when the root is extracted as in the root canal. Additional references told of its use as a covering for undersea telegraph cables and other places where electrical conductivity was undesirable. But I couldn’t really find the detail that I was looking for so went to my EAIA book shelf and my first selection was the American Mechanical Dictionary, first published in 1876 and reprinted in 1979, as a cooperative project between the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association and the Early American Industries Association. In this book I found much more detailed information about gutta percha. First of all it is a resinous substance that is tapped from the Palaquium gutta tree found in Malaysia. The compound is similar to rubber and is harvested in the same manner-deep slashes are cut into the bark of the tree and as the sap runs out it is captured in vessels that are then transported to a place where the material is turned into a raw material for manufacturing a variety of objects. It is easily molded with heat and has been used to manufacture furniture, bowls, photo frames, daguerreotype frames, golf balls, decorative boxes, canes* and other useful objects used in the home as well as a covering for undersea cables and in medicine. It is easily molded and polished and is quite hard when it is processed. Since it is “thermoplastic” it can be reshaped using heat.

As filler for root canal surgery it is almost a perfect material as it is biologically inert and will not react with the surrounding tissue, and it does not conduct heat or electricity. It is a permanent fix that is easily placed by the dentist during the root canal procedure.

Well that was my introduction to a material that you many never have heard about. Our world is connected in so many ways, who would have thought that the filler material in my tooth came from the sap of a tree growing half way around the world!

.