Sir Henry Wickham, British botanist and plantation owner, c 1900

Sir Henry Wickham, British botanist and plantation owner, c 1900. Photograph of Sir Henry Alexander Wickham (1846-1928) standing by the largest original plantation rubber tree grown from seed. In 1876, Sir John Hooker of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London, commissioned Wickham, a botanist, to collect rubber tree seeds from Peru, South America and ship them back to Britain. Of the millions Wickham sent, nearly 2000 were successfully grown into sapling trees. These saplings were then shipped to Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia to be grown on British plantations, helping to make Britain a major power in the rubber trade. Virtually all of the rubber trees in the Far East today are derived from seeds collected by Sir Henry Wickham. ©SSPL/Science Museum