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698 fiber with the gum. He considered this invention only second to vulcanization. When he had brought the fabrication of shoes to sufficient perfection, he disposed of his rights for one half cent a pair. Thus, when he should have been in condition to enjoy the fruits of his discoveries, he was harassed by financial cares to the end of his days. An idea of the business he opened up to others may be formed from the fact that the companies holding the shoe rights paid Daniel Webster a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars for his triumphant defense in 1852. It was the last legal argument Webster made, and has been considered a fitting close to his brilliant professional career (The Green Bag, vol. vii). Webster's story will serve to keep in mind the effects of cold on unvulcanized rubber: receiving a present of a cloak and hat, he one day stood the stiffened cloak on the veranda, the hat on top. Several worthy citizens, passing afterward, respectfully saluted the strange figure, thinking it was the sage himself.

After vulcanization was an established fact and patented in Europe and the United States, Goodyear worked on for sixteen years in the effort to apply rubber to new and especially humanitarian uses—life-saving appliances on water, sails, water beds, etc. In personal expenditures reasonable, he was very prodigal in his experiments—often from the desire to save time or to test his ideas upon a sufficiently large scale. It was his habit to have light and writing material at hand at night, and thus many things were recorded by his own hand, or by dictation, that would otherwise have been lost. A prey to dyspepsia, liable to attacks of gout, and delicate as he was, his achievement is the more remarkable. He received over sixty patents, yet his chief benefit, relatively, may be said to have been the consciousness of working for mankind. His rights were infringed; litigation and experiments consumed large sums. "No inventor, probably," says the commissioner, granting an extension of patent in 1858, "has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the parlance of the world as 'pirates.' The spoliation of their incessant guerrilla warfare upon his defenseless rights has unquestionably amounted to millions." He spent much time and money upon rubber sails, which, from greater impermeability, were to be smaller, from nonliability to mildew, more durable; and, being nonfreezing, to prove a great relief to sailors on northern coasts; and he died in the conviction that they would supersede all others. Captain Popham, on whose ship they were tried, accorded them high praise. Goodyear's experiments also laid the basis for hard-rubber manufacture. Gail Borden, famous for his condensed-milk process, once said to one of Mr. Goodyear's sons: "After experimenting unsuccessfully so many