Insoluble sulphur (both cas no 7704 34 9 and cas 9035 99 8 or 9035 99 8) showed signs of appearance in the 19th century. As early as 1827, Dums first observed the presence of polymerised sulphur by spraying molten sulphur into water. However, the product obtained at that time was difficult to maintain in its polymerised state. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that Wigand et al. succeeded in obtaining sulphur in the polymerised state by using a sharp cooling technique. Moving forward to the 1930s, the United States was the first country to prepare a product with an insoluble sulphur content of 50% to 60%, and achieved industrial production in the 1940s. Subsequently, other countries started to conduct research on IS products. In the 1970s, Stauffer Company of the United States made a major breakthrough in the research of IS, producing high-grade IS products for the first time, and on the basis of which a series of oil-filled insoluble sulphur products were researched one after another.
In China, the research on insoluble sulphur began in the 1970s. The former Beijing Rubber Industry Design and Research Institute initiated the relevant research in 1974, and tried various preparation processes such as gasification method, melting method, wet method (water rapid cooling) and dry method (non-water rapid cooling). After unremitting efforts, the institute succeeded in the pilot test in 1977, and officially started industrial production in 1978. In the following time, the research and development of insoluble sulphur products in China made remarkable progress. During the Seventh Five-Year Plan period, China successfully developed qualified medium-grade IS products and achieved an industrial production scale of 6,000 tonnes/year in 1988. Nowadays, the level of China's insoluble sulphur products has been greatly improved, and the ordinary oil-filled sulphur products have reached the international first-class level, and some of them have even begun to be exported to countries such as the United States.