PART I
In March, 1852, Lucy Hobart began a six months' visit with her grandparents who lived just outside Trenton, New Jersey. One morning at the breakfast table, Grandfather Hobart, whom most people called Lawyer Hobart, said to Lucy, "Little girl, a most important case is being tried at the court house this week. It may not be very interesting to a child, but I think that you, as well as Grandmother, ought to attend this morning. I want you to be able to say that you have heard the great Daniel Webster make a plea."
"Do you mean Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Grandfather?" inquired Lucy. "I thought," she resumed rather timidly, for she feared Grandfather might think she was contradicting him, "I thought people didn't like him any more."
"You come from a strong anti-slavery family, Lucy, the worst kind," answered Grandfather, good-humoredly. "Webster did seem to many people to sacrifice his ideal in that seventh of March speech two years ago, but he's a keen lawyer yet. His health is broken, though, from the criticism he has suffered. I don't believe he will live much longer. That's why I think you had better go to-day."
"I should like to ever so much," replied Lucy.
"Is it the Goodyear case?" inquired Grandmother.
"Yes," replied Grandfather. "It's his case against Horace Day, who, I think, has been outrageously infringing his patents."
"It's raining a little," remarked Grandmother. "Shall you take us if it keeps on?"
"If you feel like going. If it hadn't been for Mr. Goodyear, you know, you couldn't have gone anyway on such a day," Grandfather added.
"Why couldn't we?" inquired Lucy, after trying to think it out a few seconds.
"My stars! Don't you, a Boston girl, know about Goodyear and his rubber goods?"
"I don't believe so," answered Lucy. "Unless," she added after a pause, "you mean the man that advertises in the Transcript every night. Ever since I could read, I've seen advertisements in the paper about rubber that's been heated to two hundred and eighty degrees."
"Yes, Lucy, that's an advertisement of the Charles Goodyear I mean. I've known him a good many years (he's only a little younger than I, and we were both born in New Haven), and he's had a hard, sad life so far. To be sure, he's reckoned now as one of New Haven's prosperous business men; but unless he wins this suit, his poverty will come back again. Shall I tell you a little about him so that you'll understand some of the references you'll be sure to hear at the trial?"
Birthplace of Charles Goodyear
"Oh, I wish you would, Grandfather."
Breakfast was over then; and as Grandmother went to the kitchen to give her orders for the day, Grandfather said:
"You and I, Lucy, will sit in front of the fire a little while and talk about Mr. Goodyear. But first you'd better go with Grandmother and let her give you my galoshes and my rubber cap, and her rubber shoes and your own."
A little girl of to-day, on hearing that request, might not know exactly what she had been sent for. Rubber goods were too expensive then to be common, and "rubber shoes" had not been shortened to our "rubbers." The awkward galoshes was just a name for high rubber shoes, or overshoes.
Lucy came back soon, her arms full. The cap she placed on a table, and the three pairs of rubber shoes she put carefully down to warm in front of the fire.
"It wouldn't have been safe to put my galoshes that I had twenty years ago so near the fire," commented Grandfather, as Lucy drew up her chair beside his. "Can you guess what would have happened to them?"
"Would the fire have burned them, Grandfather?"
"Not exactly, but it would have melted them,—at least have made them as soft as suet. What Goodyear has done is to invent a way of preparing rubber or gum elastic so that it can be used in various thicknesses without being stiff as iron in cold weather or softening like wax with the heat." Then Grandfather interrupted his statements with a question:
"Do you know where we get gum elastic, Lucy?"
"Let's pretend I don't know anything about rubber," answered Lucy judiciously, after a pause. "You begin at the beginning, Grandfather."
Grandfather smiled at the little girl's strategy and began at the beginning.
"Gum elastic is really the dried sap of the South American rubber tree. To get it, the trees are tapped, just as maple trees are tapped here. But the rubber sap is yellowish white and thick as cream. The natives of Brazil long ago discovered that this sap, when hardened, would keep out water. So they made bottles from it and sent the bottles to Europe and the United States. Finally the Portuguese settlers in South America made the hardened sap into shoes; and in 1820 I saw in Boston the first pair of rubber shoes ever brought into the United States. They were as clumsy looking as Chinese shoes. They were gilded, too, not so much to make them beautiful as to keep the rubber from melting."
Tapping a Rubber Tree
"Oh, but they must have been handsome," commented Lucy. "They must have looked just like gold slippers. How much did they cost, Grandfather?"
"I don't know, Lucy. I'm not sure that they were intended to be sold. Two years afterward, though, when there were five hundred pairs for sale in Boston, the price was pretty high. I paid five dollars for mine, I remember. These were not gilded, but they were just as thick and unshapely as the first ones were. They were better than nothing, though, when the weather was not too hot nor too cold.
"During the next few years I suppose there were at least a million pairs of rubber shoes brought into this country and sold for four or five dollars a pair. Then, of course, enterprising New Englanders began to think that if people wanted rubber shoes so much, there would be a good deal of profit in manufacturing them. Then rubber companies prospered for a while; but customers soon found that the rubber shoes they bought were spoiled by heat or cold, and every rubber company went rapidly out of existence.
"It was just about this time that Mr. Goodyear sent for me to come to Philadelphia. He was in the jail there, I'm sorry to say, but for no fault of his, and he needed a lawyer's advice. The hardware firm he belonged to had failed, owing thirty thousand dollars; and though he could in no way be blamed for the disaster, on account of our poor debtors' laws he had been sent to prison. In spite of his misfortune, he was not downcast. 'It's unfair, Hobart,' he said; 'but there's a way out. Look into this kettle. That's gum elastic I've been melting. The secret of rubber will pay that thirty thousand dollars and give the world the most important commercial product of the century.'
"I was glad he was so cheerful, for I couldn't give him much encouragement about keeping out of prison. Our laws were unfair, just as he said, and I knew that his creditors were likely to send the poor fellow to prison again and again. And so they did for ten long years. But his faith in rubber never wavered. Just after he had been released the first time, I called on him again. 'Here's the means of good fortune, Hobart,' he cried cheerfully; and he showed me a mass of rubber he was pressing into shape with his wife's rolling-pin."
"I'm afraid there was always more rubber than bread under that rolling pin!" commented Grandmother, just then passing through the room on an errand.
"I'm afraid so," agreed Grandfather. "But, Lucy, your grandmother never had much patience with Mr. Goodyear's experiments. I remonstrated a good many times, myself. 'Goodyear,' said I, when I found him once in a little attic room in New York, boiling his gum with all sorts of chemicals, 'why not give it up? You can't do it without money, and nobody believes in rubber now.'
"'Don't try to discourage me,' he answered. 'I know I shall succeed. What is hidden and unknown and cannot be discovered by scientific research will most likely be discovered by accident; and it will be discovered by the one who applies himself most perseveringly to his task.'
Natives Drying Rubber
"No one could dissuade him. He borrowed money and made several hundred pairs of handsome rubber shoes that, when summer came, melted and smelled so bad they had to be buried; he won a prize for his beautiful rubber tablecloths and piano covers, but a drop of acid stained and spoiled them. The story of these years was disappointment and poverty. Once, to pay the house-rent, Mrs. Goodyear had to sell the household linen that she herself had spun; and many times, if kind friends had not sent food and money, the little Goodyear children would have had nothing to eat.
"Still, even in those dark days, there were moments of rejoicing. Three times Goodyear thought he had succeeded: once, when he mixed magnesia with the rubber; once, when he boiled the rubber in quicklime and water; and once, when he cured the surface of his rubber with what chemists call nitric acid. Moreover, another experimenter gave him a valuable clue. Some one in Massachusetts, a man named Hayward, I believe, claimed that in a dream, he had been told to use sulphur in rubber-curing. He obeyed the dream, patented the process, and sold the patent to Goodyear. After that, Goodyear could make thin rubber fabric that could withstand both heat and cold. But he wanted to cure rubber in masses, not in films."
"Couldn't he sell the things he made of the thin rubber, Grandfather?"
"Yes, he sold a number of aprons and tablecloths and such articles, but they didn't bring him much money. They attracted attention to him, though, and pretty soon the national post office department gave him an order for one hundred and fifty mail bags. Here was his opportunity. He was almost sure of success this time, for it was summer, and the heat did not seem to affect the rubber at all. Still, when the bags were finished, he hung them up for hotter weather to test, and took a vacation. When he returned, the mail bags were dropping from their hooks in shapeless, ill-smelling lumps. The world said, 'We told you so.' But Goodyear said to me after that failure, 'It wasn't the curing, Hobart, that ruined those bags. It was the coloring matter. That made them decompose.'
"This failure only made Goodyear redouble his efforts. He moved his family to Woburn, in Massachusetts, where he had been experimenting, and began to work night and day. People who had heard of his persistence would come to see him, and he would tell them of his discoveries and his certain hopes. Finally, one night, when he was talking to such a group, quite by accident he dropped upon a hot stove a piece of rubber that had been mixed with sulphur. To his surprise and delight, the rubber did not melt, but charred like leather. He had found the secret. And what a simple secret it was! Rubber could be cured by mixing it with sulphur and heating it very hot.
"This happened in 1839, when Goodyear was thirty-nine years old. He had practically solved his problem; but for nearly two years more no one would help him or even believe him.
"There, Lucy, I've told you the story from the beginning. I haven't finished it yet; but I want you to have a chance to say a word. Do you know what this process of curing rubber is called? We tan leather, you know. What do we do to rubber?"
"I don't believe I know, Grandfather."
"I saw you reading about the Latin gods and goddesses yesterday. Who was the god that hammered and made tools?"
"Vulcan, wasn't it?"
"Yes; and we use that word to help name the process of curing rubber. Just add the suffix-ize and what do you have?"
"Vul-can-ize," spoke Lucy, slowly.
"That's it. And now can you tell when rubber has been vulcanized?"
"When it has been treated with sulphur and heated very hot."
"And what were the unsuccessful ways of vulcanizing that Goodyear tried?"
"He used magnesia, quicklime and water, and nitric acid."
"Good. That shows you listened and understood. Now I'll tell you the rest. It's a sad story. But Goodyear is prosperous now, you know; and I think Mr. Webster will bring justice back."