The Romance of Rubber | Page 2

would break the mould, shaking the pieces out of the neck, leaving an unbreakable bottle that would hold liquids.
It was not long afterwards that Lisbon began to import some of these crudely fashioned articles, and it is said that in 1755 the King of Portugal sent to Brazil several pairs of his boots to be waterproofed. A few years later the Government of Para, Brazil, sent him a full suit of rubber clothes. For all that, this elastic gum was for the most part only a curiosity, and few people knew there was such a thing.
About the year 1770, a black, bouncing ball of caoutchouc, as the Indians called the gum, after many travels found its way to England, and Priestley, the man who gave us oxygen, learned that it would rub out pencil marks. Then and there he named it what you have probably guessed long before this: "rub-ber." Nearly every language except English uses in place of the word rubber some form of the native Word "caoutchouc," which means "weeping tree." After Priestley's discovery, a one-inch "rubber" sold for three shillings, or about seventy-five cents, but artists were glad to pay even that price, because their work was made so much easier.

CHAPTER 2
CHARLES GOODYEAR
In 1800 Brazil was the only country manufacturing rubber articles, and her best market soon proved to be North America. Probably the first rubber this country saw was brought to New England in clipper ships as ballast in the form of crude lumps and balls. Rubber shoes, water-bottles, powder-flasks, and tobacco-pouches found buyers in the American ports, but rubber shoes were most in demand.
Soon some Americans began to import raw rubber and to manufacture rubber goods of their own, and in the old world a Scotchman named Macintosh found a way of waterproofing cloth by spreading on it a thin coating of rubber dissolved in coal naphtha. Many people still refer to raincoats as mackintoshes. Rubber clothing shared favor with rubber shoes, but its popularity was short-lived for it did not wear well and was almost as sensitive to temperature as molasses and butter. The rubber shoes and coats get hard and stiff in winter and soft and sticky in summer. A man wearing a pair of rubber overalls who sat down too near a warm stove soon found that his overalls, his chair and himself were stuck fast together. The first rubber coats became so stiff in cold weather that when you took one off you could stand it up in the middle of the floor and leave it, for it would stand like a tent until the rubber thawed out, and when thawed it was almost as uncomfortable as is fly- paper to the fly.
One day Charles Goodyear, a Connecticut hardware merchant of an inventive turn of mind, went to a store to buy a life preserver. He could find only imperfect ones, but they drew his attention to the study of rubber, and presently he was thinking of it by day and dreaming of it by night. Rubber became a passion with him. He felt sure some way could be found to make it firm yet flexible regardless of temperature, and for ten years he experimented with different mixtures and processes, hoping to find the right one. So intent was he on his search that he found time for nothing else. Due to neglect his business went to pieces and he became very poor.
Finally, in 1839, when he was on the point of giving up in despair, he accidentally came upon the solution. He was experimenting in his kitchen, a place which, through lack of funds, he was often forced to use as a laboratory. Part of a mixture of rubber, sulphur and other chemicals, with which he was working, happened to drop on the top of the stove. It lay there sizzling and charring until the odor of the burning rubber called his attention to it. As he stooped to scrape it off the stove he gave a start of wonder as he noted that a change had come over the rubber during its brief contact with the stove.
To his surprise the mixture had not melted, but had flattened out in the shape of a silver dollar. When it had cooled enough to be handled, he found that it bent and stretched easily, without cracking or breaking, and that it always snapped back to its original shape. Strangest of all, it was no longer sticky. Apparently half the problem was solved. Whether his new mixture would stand the cold he had yet to find out, so he nailed it on the outside of the door and went to bed. Probably he slept but little and was up early. At any rate he found the rubber unaffected by the cold.
Then he knew