Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/712

692 was attained by E. M. Chaffee (1830), who invented a machine for spreading his oil-of-turpentine solution on cloth. Not to invest in rubber companies about 1833 was thought to indicate a lack of financial insight.

Goodyear read of the success of these companies and, in casting about to help himself, naturally turned to the substance which had earlier attracted his attention. Having made an improvement in the valve of a life-preserver, he returned to the Roxbury Company and tried to sell them his invention. The agent recognized its merit, and, hoping to enlist a clever intelligence in their interests, unfolded to him the startling condition of rubber manufacture in the United States: that the seeming prosperity was not real; that the company had made and sold large quantities of goods in the cool months of 1833-'34, but the following summer the greater part had melted; and that new ingredients and machinery had been vainly tried. He urged him to try to solve the secret, intimating that almost any price would be gladly given. By the end of 1836 the "India-rubber fever" had spent itself, not a solvent company was left, and the very name was detested.

Charles Goodyear at once began his experiments, melting his first gum in the debtors' prison, Philadelphia. He continued them the winter of 1834-'35, making his mixtures with his own hands and rolling them with a rolling pin. He considers it fortunate that rubber is five cents per pound, for as long as he can command that sum he will be able to continue experiments. And he soon discovers that chemists, physicians, and researchers have been baffled in all attempts to make the substance take on the qualities desired. He is thirty-five, bankrupt, and in poor health, yet does not shrink from what to the strongest might well have seemed a superhuman task; and is sustained by "the reflection that what is hidden and unknown, and can not be discovered by scientific research, will most likely be discovered by accident if at all, and by the man who applies himself most perseveringly to the subject." With a friendly loan he makes shoes of fine appearance, but summer finds them reduced to an offensive mass. He thinks there must be some substance to mix with the gum, and tries almost everything he can obtain. None of the learned men indicate the course to be taken; he is on an unknown sea.

He has the best success with magnesia, producing the first white goods; but his beautiful book and piano covers began to ferment, and soon turned brittle and hard. At New Haven he recommenced the work which was to occupy his attention to the end of his life, shoes being the first goods offered, as they were of easy manufacture. This was the beginning of the long-continued family employment