The Romance of Rubber | Page 2

it, and the Amazon Indians were making boots which, when
blackened in smoke, looked like leather. Most interesting of all, they
coated bottle-shaped moulds, and when the gum had hardened they

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