Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/409

 Inventors as Martyrs to Science.

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��a great subject is Charles Goodyear, whose history is quite as interesting as any who have gone before. It is to him that we are indebted for India- rubber, which is now so universally used and essential.

In the North American Review for 1865, there is a most entertaining and really tiirilling account of this man's exi)erience, which I shall con- dense. " Who would have thought to find a romance in the history of India-rubber. We are familiar with the stories of poor and friendless men, possessed with an idea, and pursuing their object amid obloquy, neglect, and suffering to the final triumph, of which final triumph other men reaped the substantial re- ward, leaving to the discoverer the barren glory of his achievement. of that illustrious order. We trust to be able to show that Charles Good- year is entitled to a place in it. Whether we consider the prodigious and unforeseen importance of his dis- covery, or his scarcely paralleled de- votion to his object in the face of the most disheartening obstacles, we feel it to be due to his memory, to his descendants, and to the public that his story should be told. Our great- grandfathers knew India-rubber only as a curiosity, and our grandfathers only as a means of erasing pencil- marks. It was in the year 1820 that a pair of India-rubber shoes was seen for the first time in the United (States. They were covered with gilding, and resembled in shape the shoes of a Chinamen, and were hand- ed about in Boston only as a curi- osity.
 * 1) Columbus is the representative man

In 1834, while examining a rubber

��life preserver, Goodyear became in- terested in the subject. He found that the rubber was a failure for all practical purposes. Shoes and fab- rics sold in the cool months at high prices, melted to common gum in summer, and 120,000 worth had been returned, emitting an odor so offen- sive that it had to be buried. The directors were at their wits' ends. The companies lost $2,000,000 before Goodyear undertook the investigation of India-rubber. He really appears to have felt himself "called "to study rubber. ^ He would refer the whole to the great Creator, who directs the operations of mind to the develop- ment of the properties of matter in his own way at the time when they are specially needed, influencing some mind for every work or calling." He was a bankrupt at the time when this idea took hold of him. He melted his first pound of rubber while he was living within the prison limits, and struggling to keep out of the jail it- self.

He began his experiments in cir- cumstances as little favorable as can be imagined. There were only two things in his favor. One was his con- viction that India-rubber could be subjugated, and that he was the man destined to subjugate it. The other was, that rubber being now consider- ed almost worthless he could labor as long as he could raise five cents and procure access to a fire. He was seldom out of jail a whole year from 1835 to 1841, and never out of dan- ger of arrest.

The patience of his friends and his little fund of money were both exhausted ; and one by one the relics of his former prosperity, even to his

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