FIG. 163.—MAKING RUBBER SHOES.
Since the time of Goodyear, the amplification of this art and the multiplication of uses for rubber, and its increased commercial importance, have gone on at such a rate of increase that to-day we may be said to be living in the rubber age. Its uses and applications are legion, and they extend literally from the cradle to the grave. When the baby comes into the world its introduction to India rubber begins at once with the nursing bottle and the gum cloth, and when the aged invalid takes leave of the world his last moments are soothed with the water bag and the rubber bed, and between these extremes we find it in evidence everywhere about us. In wearing apparel it extends from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot—rubber cap, coat, gloves, and shoes. The man has it in his suspenders and his pipe stem, the woman in her garters and dress shields, and the baby in its teething ring and rattle. The soldier stands on picket duty in the rain, and the rubber blanket protects him from rheumatism. If wounded, the surgeon dresses his mangled limb with rubber bandages, and when he gets well he has a rubber cushion on the end of his crutch, or on the foot of his artificial leg. If wounded in the mouth perhaps the government gives him a set of artificial teeth on a rubber plate. The rubber mat greets you at the front door, a little pad cushions the door stops and the backs of chairs, and a ring seals the mouth of the fruit jar. The whole array of toilet articles, including combs, brushes, mirrors, shoe horns, etc., are made from it. In the parlor it is found in picture frames and the piano cover; in the bath room the wash rag, water bag, rubber cup, and hose pipe of the shower bath are all made of it; in the play room are found rubber balls and toys of all kinds; in the kitchen the clothes wringer and the table cloth; in the dining room the handles of knives, and the tea tray, and what is more useful and more ubiquitous in the office than the rubber band, the rubber ruler, the pencil eraser, or the fountain pen? But these are only a few of the personal and indoor uses and applications. Rubber belting for machinery, fire engine and garden hose, steam engine packing, car springs, covers for carriages and the big guns of the navy, life preservers, billiard table cushions, and chemical and surgical apparatus in endless variety. The electrical world is almost entirely dependent upon it for the insulation of our ocean cables and electric light wires, for battery cups, and the insulating mountings of all electrical apparatus. The pneumatic bicycle tire could not exist without rubber, and the modern application of it to this use alone amounts to nearly four million pounds annually. Every automobile carriage takes twenty-five pounds of rubber for each tire, or 100 pounds altogether. This great and growing industry, together with the now common use of rubber tires on horse-drawn vehicles, raises the sum total of rubber employed in the arts to an enormous figure.
That the sap of an uncultivated tree in a swampy, tropical, and malarial forest, thousands of miles from civilization, should cut so great a figure in the necessities of modern life, seems strange and unaccountable on any basis of probabilities. It is only another illustration of the possibilities of the patient and persistent work of the inventor. Charles Goodyear took this nearly worthless material, and made of it, as Parton said in 1865—““not a new material merely, but a new class of materials, applicable to a thousand divers uses. It was still India rubber, but its surface 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 a paper that would not tear; it was a 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 like steel. Trifling variations in the ingredients, in the proportion and in the heating, made it either pliable as kid, tougher than ox hide, as elastic as whalebone, or as rigid as flint.””
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
Chemistry.
[Its Evolution as a Science]—[The Coal Tar Products]—[Fermenting and Brewing]—[Glucose, Gun Cotton and Nitro-Glycerine]—[Electro-Chemistry]—[Fertilizers and Commercial Products]—[New Elements of the Nineteenth Century].
The foundation stones of empirical discovery, upon which this science is based, had been crudely shaped by the workmen of preceding centuries, but the classification and laying of them into the structure of an exact science is the work of the Nineteenth Century. The glass of the Phœnicians, and the dyes and metallurgical operations of the Egyptians, involved some chemical knowledge; much more did the operations of the alchemists, who vainly sought to convert the baser metals into gold, but these were only the crude building stones, out of which the great complex modern structure has been raised. In the Sixteenth Century the study of chemistry, apart from alchemy, began, and some attention was given to its application to the uses of medicine. Aristotle’s four elements—fire, air, earth and water—were no longer accepted as representing a correct theory, and new ones were proposed only to be found as erroneous, and to be superseded in time by others.