His stock of money was soon exhausted, his own valuables, and even the trinkets of his wife were pawned, but Goodyear never for an instant thought of giving up the problem which he had set himself to solve. Again he believed he had discovered the secret by boiling the solution of rubber and magnesia in quicklime and water, when he found to his dismay that a drop of the weakest acid, such as the juice of an apple, would reduce an apparently fine sheet of rubber to a sticky mass. The first real step in the right direction was made by accident, for, in removing some bronzing from a piece of rubber with aqua fortis, he found that the chemical worked a remarkable change in the rubber, which would now stand a degree of heat that would have melted it before. He called this "curing" India-rubber, and after careful tests, patented the process, secured a partner with capital, rented an old India-rubber works on Staten Island, and set to work, full of hope. But commercial disaster swept away his partner's fortune, and Goodyear could find no one else who would risk his money in so doubtful an enterprise.
Indeed, in all America he seemed to be the only man who had the slightest hope of accomplishing anything with India-rubber. His friends regarded him as a lunatic, and especially when he made himself a suit of clothes out of his India-rubber cloth, and wore it on all occasions. One day a man looking for Goodyear asked one of the latter's friends how he would recognize him if he met him.
"If you see a man with an India-rubber coat on," was the reply, "India-rubber shoes, India-rubber hat, and in his pocket an India-rubber purse with not a cent in it, that's Goodyear."
The description was a good one, for that purse had been without a cent in it for a long time. It was to stay empty for some weary years longer. For he had not yet discovered the secret of making India-rubber permanent, as he found when he tried to fill a contract for a hundred and fifty mail bags ordered by the government. The bags were apparently perfect, but in less than a month began to soften and ferment and were thrown back on his hands. All his property was seized and sold for debt; his family was reduced to the point of starvation, and friends, relatives and even his wife joined in demanding that he abandon this useless quest.
Goodyear was in despair, for he had just made another discovery that seemed to promise success—the discovery that sulphur was the active "curing" agent for India-rubber, and that it was the sulphuric acid in aqua fortis which had wrought the changes in rubber which he had noticed in his experiments. One day, while explaining the properties of a sulphur-cured piece of rubber to an incredulous crowd in a country-store, he happened to let it fall on the red-hot stove. To his amazement it did not melt; it had shrivelled some, but had not softened. And, at last, he had the key, which was that rubber mixed with sulphur and subjected to a certain degree of heat, would be rendered impervious to any extremes of temperature!
But what degree of heat? He experimented in the oven of his wife's cooking-stove, and in every other kind of oven to which he could gain access; he induced a brick-layer to make him an oven, paying him in rubber aprons; he grew yellow and shrivelled, for he and his family were living upon the charity of neighbors; more than once, there was not a morsel of food in the house; his friends thought seriously of shutting him up in an asylum; he tried to get to New York, but was arrested for debt, and thrown into prison. Even in prison, he tried to interest men with capital in his discovery, for he needed delicate and expensive apparatus, and at last two brothers, William and Emory Rider agreed to advance him a certain sum. The laboratory was built, and in 1844, Goodyear astonished the world by producing perfect vulcanized India-rubber with economy and certainty. The long and desperate battle had been won!
Did he reap a fortune? By no means! In one way or another, he was defrauded of his patent rights. In England, for instance, another man who received a copy of the American patent, actually applied for and obtained the English rights in his own name. In 1858, the United States Commissioner of Patents said, "No inventor, probably, 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.'" Worn out with work and disappointment, Goodyear died two years later, a bankrupt. But his story should be remembered, and his memory honored, by every American.
Near a little mountain hamlet of central Sweden stands a great pyramid of iron cast from ore dug from the neighboring mountains. It is set up on a base of granite also quarried from those mountains, and bears upon it two names, Nils Ericsson and John Ericsson. The monument marks the place where these two men were born. The life of the former was passed in Sweden and does not concern us, but John Ericsson's name is closely connected with the history of the United States.
He was the son of a poor miner, and one of his earliest recollections was of the sheriff coming to take away all their household goods in payment of a debt. He was put to work in the iron mines as soon as he was able to earn a few pennies daily, and he soon developed a remarkable aptitude for mechanics. At the age of eleven, he planned a pumping engine to keep the mines free from water, and at the age of twelve, was made a member of the surveying party in charge of the construction of the Gotha ship canal, and was soon himself in charge of a section of the work, with six hundred men under him, one of whom was detailed to follow him with a stool, upon which he stood to use the surveying instruments. It reminds one of Farragut commanding a war ship, at the age of eleven.