It vulcanized instantly.This was an accident which only Goodyear could have interpreted.And it was the last.The strange substance from the jungles of the tropics had been mastered.It remained, however, to perfect the process, to ascertain the accurate formula and the exact degree of heat.The Goodyears were so poor during these years that they received at any time a barrel of flour from a neighbor thankfully.There is a tradition that on one occasion, when Goodyear desired to cross between Staten Island and New York, he had to give his umbrella to the ferry master as security for his fare, and that the name of the ferry master was Cornelius Vanderbilt, "a man who made much money because he took few chances." The incident may easily have occurred, though the ferry master could hardly have been Vanderbilt himself, unless it had been at an earlier date.
Another tradition says that one of Goodyear's neighbors described him to an inquisitive stranger thus: "You will know him when you see him; he has on an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and shoes, and an India rubber purse WITHOUT A CENT IN IT!"Goodyear's trials were only beginning.He had the secret at last, but nobody would believe him.He had worn out even the most sanguine of his friends."That such indifference to this discovery, and many incidents attending it, could have existed in an intelligent and benevolent community," wrote Goodyear later, "can only be accounted for by existing circumstances in that community The great losses that had been sustained in the manufacture of gum-elastic: the length of time the inventor had spent in what appeared to them to be entirely fruitless efforts to accomplish anything with it; added to his recent misfortunes and disappointments, all conspired, with his utter destitution, to produce a state of things as unfavorable to the promulgation of the discovery as can well be imagined.He, however, felt in duty bound to beg in earnest, if need be, sooner than that the discovery should be lost to the world and to himself....How he subsisted at this period charity alone can tell, for it is as well to call things by their right names; and it is little else than charity when the lender looks upon what he parts with as a gift.The pawning or selling some relic of better days or some article of necessity was a frequent expedient.His library had long since disappeared, but shortly after the discovery of this process, he collected and sold at auction the schoolbooks of his children, which brought him the trifling sum of five dollars;small as the amount was, it enabled him to proceed.At this step he did not hesitate.The occasion, and the certainty of success, warranted the measure which, in other circumstances, would have been sacrilege."His itinerary during those years is eloquent.Wherever there was a man, who had either a grain of faith in rubber or a little charity for a frail and penniless monomaniac, thither Goodyear made his way.The goal might be an attic room or shed to live in rent free, or a few dollars for a barrel of flour for the family and a barrel of rubber for himself, or permission to use a factory's ovens after hours and to hang his rubber over the steam valves while work went on.From Woburn in 1839, the year of his great discovery, he went to Lynn, from Lynn back to the deserted factory at Roxbury.Again to Woburn, to Boston, to Northampton, to Springfield, to Naugatuck; in five years as many removes.When he lacked boat or railway fare, and he generally did, he walked through winds and rains and drifting snow, begging shelter at some cottage or farm where a window lamp gleamed kindly.
Goodyear took out his patent in 1844.The process he invented has been changed little, if at all, from that day to this.He also invented the perfect India rubber cloth by mixing fiber with the gum a discovery he considered rightly as secondary in importance only to vulcanization.When he died in 1860 he had taken out sixty patents on rubber manufactures.He had seen his invention applied to several hundred uses, giving employment to sixty thousand persons, producing annually eight million dollars' worth of merchandise--numbers which would form but a fraction of the rubber statistics of today.
Everybody, the whole civilized world round, uses rubber in one form or another.And rubber makes a belt around the world in its natural as well as in its manufactured form.The rubber-bearing zone winds north and south of the equator through both hemispheres.In South America rubber is the latex of certain trees, in Africa of trees and vines.The best "wild" rubber still comes from Para in Brazil.It is gathered and prepared for shipment there today by the same methods the natives used four hundred years ago.The natives in their canoes follow the watercourses into the jungles.They cut V-shaped or spiral incisions in the trunks of the trees that grow sheer to sixty feet before spreading their shade.At the base of the incisions they affix small clay cups, like swallows' nests.Over the route they return later with large gourds in which they collect the fluid from the clay cups.The filled gourds they carry to their village of grass huts and there they build their smoky fires of oily palm nuts.Dipping paddles into the fluid gum they turn and harden it, a coating at a time, in the smoke.The rubber "biscuit" is cut from the paddle with a wet knife when the desired thickness has been attained.
Goodyear lived for sixteen years after his discovery of the vulcanization process.During the last six he was unable to walk without crutches.He was indifferent to money.To make his discoveries of still greater service to mankind was his whole aim.It was others who made fortunes out of his inventions.
Goodyear died a poor man.
In his book, a copy of which was printed on gumelastic sheets and bound in hard rubber carved, he summed up his philosophy in this statement: "The writer is not disposed to repine and say that he has planted and others have gathered the fruits.The advantages of a career in life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents, as it is too often done.Man has just cause for regret when he sows and no one reaps."
