Gutta percha sounds like something that might have been mentioned in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, though a quick check of the first concordance I could find doesn’t include it.
Agree. It has that smell of being an old British Empire English term borrowed / corrupted from something they found in India.
Jodhpurs, Gurkhas, and Gutta Percha, oh my!
Not quite as fun as “rum, sodomy, and the lash”, but equally 1800s British.
Sounds like it might be a condiment for a po’boy sandwich.
I was used for early electrical insulation.
A few decades before Holmes’s time, Senator Charles Sumner was beaten nearly to death with a gutta percha cane in the Senate chamber before the Civil War. A gutta percha cane suggests it’s a stiff or hard rubber rather than something you make a hose or tubing out of.
Me, too. But why? I have no idea, but there is apparently some male hormone, possessed even by male pups, that makes them want to own cool heavy shiny objects! 
I once visited the Long Now Foundation’s workshop in San Francisco where they had some of the parts for their 10,000 year clock on display. One of them was a tungsten pendulum bob, maybe about 4 inches in diameter. I gave it a nudge and it didn’t move. I assumed it was bolted to the table. Then I remembered how dense tungsten is and gave it some more force. I was able to lift it using two hands. It weighed about 25 pounds.
I got kind of fascinated by tungsten after that. I have a 1 inch sphere that weighs about 150 g. I’d like to get a bigger one but it’s hard to justify the cost for something whose only purpose is to be surprisingly heavy.
Wait, doesn’t everyone have a large hunk of tungsten in their household? It’s obviously required for activities. Here’s mine:
Quarter for scale. 50x50 mm cylinder. Weighs about 4 pounds.
Yeah, that was a nice hunk 'o tungsten. Very satisfying to hold. Dunno if it’s still there.
Is it testosterone that does this, or is it one of the other androgens, like maybe dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, androstenedione, or androstenediol? I dunno, but I loves me heavy shiny cubes or cylinders of tungsten, new cars, and new computers!
Whatever it is, it is not limited purely to tungsten. I have a magnesium cylinder of identical dimensions (along with a few others, including titanium). It feels like styrofoam in comparison.
All this talk of tungsten calls to mind a course I took in college about Arthurian Romance. I was given to understand that a great warrior knight, Wolfram, wore armor made of tungsten (hence the chemical symbol, W, for Wolframite).
He must have had STR and CON stats of 18 if the specific gravity of tungsten is that high.
You missed the opportunity to call it a “weighted companion cylinder”.
According to wiki, Tungsten is one of the oldest steel alloys. Tungsten steel contains 2-18% Tungsten by weight. It is hard but brittle. Tungsten steel - Wikipedia
My aluminum weighted companion cube would not forgive me. The silence is palpable as it is.
I machined all my cylinders myself aside from the tungsten. Just don’t have the capability. A tungsten companion cube would be pretty awesome but getting it made would be a challenge (or a huge expense).
Here they are, on a dreary day, from Dead Horse Point State Park:
Potash (in the wood ash form) isn’t a component used to manufacture black powder per se.
Saltpeter (KNO^3 or Potassium Nitrate) however, is.
Potash was employed to extract Saltpeter from the liquor of dung-urine “beds”.
I know…nitpicking.
I attended a lecture at law school, dealing with who controlled provincial resources, such as oil and gas, minerals, hydroelectricity, and yes, potash. The lecturer had a strong accent (not sure what it was), and she pronounced it “p-TASH.” Confused a few of my fellow students.
I could see that making sense to a reader, short for p’tashium chloride.
My first root canal, in 1987, used gutta percha as a tooth filler. When it had to be re-done in 2011, they used a different filler, although I don’t remember what it was.
Not exactly. Potash provided the potassium. Dung-urine beds, along with old rotting timbers were used as the source of nitrogen. Potassium Nitrate was produced from those ingredients, which was used in the manufacture of black powder.