Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/715

Rh piano covers, table and carriage cloths superior to any that had been produced up to this time in the United States. A demand arises; he is enabled to sell licenses for manufacture, realizing five thousand dollars in a single year; and the family is glad to be united and comfortable in Roxbury. The hopes of the friends of India rubber were rising high.

In the summer of 1838 Goodyear met Nathaniel Hayward, of Woburn, Massachusetts. He had been the foreman of a rubber company, and manufactured on his own account. Hayward had tried powdered charcoal and lime to dry the gum, but now sprinkled sulphur upon it and hardened it by the rays of the sun, claiming to have received the process in a dream. The same discovery was made simultaneously in Germany by Dr. Lüdersdorf. (This chemist was yet to discover that the process only "cured" the surface.) Hayward's discovery had attracted no attention, and had the serious objection of causing a very disagreeable smell whenever employed. Goodyear is surprised to find much the same effect upon the surface of the gum as that produced by his "acid-gas" process. He purchases Hayward's patent of February 24, 1839, gives him employment, and manufactures at Woburn and Roxbury. He and others supposed that the process also "cured" the body of the gum. The increased attention excited by rubber at the time led to an order from the Government for mail bags, and he gave it the widest possible publicity. At last the world shall see what he can do! He hastened to gather his family around him to share in the beckoning prosperity, and his aged parents and two younger brothers, sufferers from his failure, joined him. What was his mortification to find his beautiful mail bags decomposing and dropping from their hooks! In late experiments he had been using coloring matters, white lead, vermilion, etc. Introduced freely into the bag composition, they had proved deleterious, as the gum was then "cured." After his final invention he was enabled to make use of them. He says, "Had it not been for this misfortune from the use of these articles, in all human probability the vulcanizing process would never have been discovered."

Our inventor was now at the stage where he could fabricate thin sheets, somewhat durable. How to produce the effect in a mass of the substance? He feels himself near the solution of the question. Outwardly the worst discouragement besets him. Instead of the large fortune his friends had anticipated, his whole invention seems now to be worthless. The public, so often misled by experimenters, becomes utterly disgusted with the business and the material. From comparative ease and comfort Goodyear is once again reduced to absolute want. Everything salable is sold for the payment of debts;