Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/716

696 he sees his parents and family deprived of their means of support; he has passed four years in trying to improve a material that has resisted all the ingenuity of investigation, that had ruined so many men, and in which large capital had been lost; and he has given his exclusive attention to the subject. "It was generally agreed," he says, "that the man who could proceed further in a course of this sort is fairly deserving of all the distress brought upon himself." His friends urged him to take up some other business, declaring that he was only bringing discomfort upon himself and others. But he kept on and made a few articles by the old process, by which means and the pawn shops the family was able to live. Had machinery or important capital been necessary, he needs must have relinquished his experiments and abandoned the pursuit of what so many regarded as an ignis fatuus. As it was, with a small sum he made experiment upon experiment, trying to retrieve the lost reputation of his invention. The influence of sulphur upon the surface especially interested him. At Woburn his triumphant discovery was to be accomplished. Parlor became workshop. Here with his family and two assistants he manufactured shoes. The family is described as happy in all their extremities; the mother uncomplaining; the father, amid his cares and the struggle to solve the important problem, always genial.

So, in the spring of 1839, he is trying the effect of heat upon the mail-bag compound. While talking in the kitchen with persons familiar with India rubber, he makes a rapid gesture, and a piece of the gum he holds in his hand accidentally comes in contact with the hot stove. As the substance, in its natural state, melts at a low degree of heat, great was his surprise to find that it had charred without dissolving, and that no part of it was sticky. His daughter says: "As I was passing in and out of the room, I casually observed the little piece of gum which he was holding near the fire, and I noticed also that he was unusually animated by some discovery which he had made. He nailed the piece outside in the intense cold. In the morning he brought it in, holding it up exultingly. He had found it perfectly flexible, as it was when he put it out." When further experiments show that his process "cures" the rubber through, and that the new substance resists heat, cold, and the action of acids, and before he has convinced any one of the value of his invention, "I felt myself," he says, "amply repaid for the past, and quite indifferent as to the trials of the future." Two years passed before he was able to convince any one outside of his family of the importance of his discovery. The world had to be shown, by time and varying temperatures, that "metallization" (as the process was first called) was effective. This was a bitter period for the Goodyears. Their