Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/411

 Inventors as ]\tarty}'s to Science.

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��friend of liis coiikl conceal his impa- tience when he heard him pronounce the word India-rubber. Business men recoiled from tlie name of it.

We see him waiting for his wife to draw the loaves from her oven that he might put into it a batch of India- rubber to bake, and, watching it all the evening, far into the night, to see what effect was produced by baking. We see him boilino- it in his wife's sauce-pans, suspending it before the nose of the tea kettle, and hanging it from the handle of that vessel to within an inch of the boiling water. We see him roasting it in the ashes and in hot sand, toasting it before a slow fire and a quick fire, cooking it for one hour and twenty-four hours. Then we see him resorting to the shops and factories in Woburn, ask- ing the privilege of using an oven after working hours, or hanging a piece of rubber in the manhole of the boiler. The foreman testified that he was a great plague to them, and smeared their works with his stickN' compound ; they regarded him as lit- tle better than a troublesome lunatic.

With all the generosity of his neighbors, his children were often sick, hungry, and cold, without med- icine, food, or fuel. One witness testifies,—^' I found [in 1839] that he even parted with his children's school-books for five dollars, with which he laid in a fresh stock of o-um and sulphur, and kept on experiment- ing."

The crisis came when he had in his house a dead child but not the means of burying it, and five living depend- ants without a morsel of food to give them. The store-keepers refused to trust further. In these terrible cir-

��cumstances he applied to a friend who had never failed him. He re- ceived in reply a letter of severe and cutting reproach, enclosing seven dol- lars, which he said was only given out of pity for his innocent and suffering family. He had touched bottom. A stranger sent a barrel of flour. A relative presented fifty dollars. Two brothers in New York believed in him, and aided him so that he could con- tinue the experiments. His brother- in-law advanced forty thousand dol- lars, and in 184 4 he was at length able to |)roduce vulcanized India-rub- ber with expedition, economy, and success.

" He had added to the arts, not a new material merely, but a new class of materials applicable to a thousand diverse uses. His product had more than the elasticity of India-rubber, while it was divested of all those properties which had lessened its utili- ty. It was still India-rubber, but its surfaces would not adhere, nor would it harden at any degree of cold, nor soften at any degree of heat. It was a cloth impervious to water. It was paper that would not tear. It was parchment that would not crease. It was leather which neither rain nor sun would injure. It was ebony that could be run into a mould. It was ivory that could be worked like wax. It was wood that never cracked, shrunk, nor decayed. It was metal, elastic metal as Daniel Webster termed it, that could be wound round the finger or tied into a knot, and which preserved its elasticity almost like steel. Trifling variations in the ingredients, in the proportions, and in the heating made it either as pliable as kid. tougher than ox-hide, as elas-

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