CHARLES GOODYEAR AND HIS GOLOSHES.
WHY should we not tell the story of goloshes? There is nothing else to tell, and it is well worth the telling, if only because it includes the biography of a man who was in a humble way as persevering and as successful as Palissy the potter. Most of our readers have seen, and half of them have worn, the con- trivance called, we have no idea why, a golosh, an India-rubber shoe originally imported from the United States, which has superseded the patten. It is a nasty thing at best, well as it is now made ; a slippery shoe, which makes unsafe walking on muddy pavement, is hard to put off or on, and dirties the fingers un- conscionably, but such as it is, it is the only thing which really keeps out the wet. Most of us dread wet feet, but we have not yet succeeded in compelling shoemakers to make us a wet-proof shoe, to " mackintosh" sole leather, or even insert an impermeable substance between the sole and its lining. We are driven to the alternative either of heavy boots, which double the exertion of walking and destroy the spring of the step—ask professional run- ners—or to " goloshes." These latter articles have, it appears, a. history, for it was in the effort to make them that Charles Good- year, mechanic and merchant of Connecticut, spent eleven years of his life, and discovered the mode of utilizing India-rubber by " vulcanizing" it, now employed in every kind of art, and em- ploying sixty thousand highly skilled artizans. An India-rubber shoe had, it is true, been made before him. A sort of bucket made of the gum was imported from South America, kept in a cool place in summer, and carefully heated in winter, and one E. M. Chaffee, foreman of a patent-leather factory in Boston, had discovered in 1830 a mode of dissolving India-rubber in turpentine and spreading it on cloth, which promised great results. Com- panies were formed to try it, and for two years the " Roxbury patent" yielded immense profits, and induced speculators to invest in it some 400,0001. Then it collapsed. It was discovered that cloth so treated never lasted two summers, but either melted or became sticky, and stank abominably. The compahies were ruined, and the oldest of them, the Roxbury Co mpany, applied to one Charles Goodyear for assistance.
This Charles Goodyear was an insolvent ironfounder, a Yankee born in Connecticut, very shrewd, very inventive, and possessed of that asinine patience in which the true Anglo-Saxon, whether of Connecticut or Lancashire, exceeds the rest of mankind. The idea that he could make India-rubber useful by destroying its property of liquescence without impairing its elasticity took a fixed hold of his mind, and he melted his first pound of gum while in prison for debt. His first- idea was the old one of dissolving the gum in turpentine, and he contrived to make some very pretty shoes, excellent shoes, with the slight drawback that as June ap- proached they all melted away into a stinking and sticky paste. He knew no chemistry, but repeated experiments convinced him that it was only by the admixture of some substance with his gum that he should ever succeed, and for a time he tried every article he could think of in the pharmacopeia. Magnesia was his favourite nostrum, but some apparently excellent bindings made of India-rubber and magnesia turned after exposure into a sub- stance as hard and brittle as shell. His experiments wore out his small means till he pawned his wife's trinkets and his own clothes, and finally, after two years of effort, betook himself to New York, to obtain assistance from any one who would put faith in India-rubber. There he found friends, who supplied materials on credit and lent him a room, and in a few months he discovered a new and very successful device. He boiled India-rubber in magnesia and quick-lime, and produced some sheets very smooth and very firm, and which sold very well, being of course imper- meable to water, but which had one little defect. A drop of the weakest acid, such as apple juice, made them all sticky again. Then he tried the gum mixed with quick-lime only, then, guided by an accident, dissolved in aquafortis, and this time he hit on something valuable. He really could coat cloth thinly, set up a factory, and might never have done anything more, but that a partner who found him his money failed, and he became literally a beggar. While living on charity, however, he still could not give up his darling project, but people now believed him India-rubber mad, and would not even look at his experiments, while one of his friends declared, " If you see a man with an India-rubber coat on, or India-rubber shoes, an India-rubber cap, and in his pocket an India-rubber purse with not a cent in its that is he." The accusation was true too, Goodyear, who was before all things Yankee, wearing nothing but India-rubber as an advertisement of his dearly-loved material. Three years had now elapsed, and again he was visited by a gleam of success. He made piano-cloths and carriage-covers by his aquafortis process, so good that the public bought them rapidly, and Government gave him an order for 150 mail-bags. Goodyear, after his fashion, advertised this order everywhere, and looked on it as the foundation of his fortune, but unluckily the handles of the bags were thick, the aquafortis would not touch them, and they melted as they hung in the factory for exhibition. He was utterly ruined, sold up by one of his creditors, and might have abandoned his pursuit, but that he found a man, one Hayward, hardening India-rubber by baking sulphur into it under a bright sun. He bought this man's patent, satis- fied that the secret lay there, as indeed it did, but it was not till he had worked at his pursuit six years more that accident revealed to him the whole truth. At Woburn, says the North American Review, from which we have taken our facts, "one day, in the spring of 1839, he was standing with his brother and several other persons near a very hot stove. He held in his hand a mass of his compound of sulphur and gum, upon which he was expatiating in his usual vehement manner,—the company exhibiting the indif- ference to which he was accustomed. In the crisis of his argu- ment he made a violent gesture, which brought the mass in contact with the stove, which was hot enough to melt India-rubber in- stantly ; upon looking at it a moment after, he perceived that his compound had not melted in the least degree ! It had charred as leather chars, but no part of the surface had dissolved. There was not a sticky place upon it. To say that he was astonished at this would but faintly express his ecstacy of amazement. The result was absolutely new to all experience,—India-rubber not melting in contact with red-hot iron ! A man must have been five years absorbed in the pursuit of an object to comprehend his emotions. Eagerly he showed his charred India-rubber to his brother, and to the other bystanders, and dwelt upon the novelty and marvel- lousness of his fact. They regarded it with complete indifference. The good man had worn them all out. Fifty times before he had van to them, exulting in some new discovery, and they sup- posed of course that this was another of his chimeras." He lead discovered that sulphur mixed with India-rubber produced a substance useful for every purpose to which he desired to apply it, but he still had to discover the true proportions. Untiring, un- daunted, sustained by a supreme confidence in himself, ridiculous perhaps in connection with goloshes, not ridiculous in connection with glaze on pottery, he toiled on for six years, trying every imaginable combination of India-rubber, and sulphur, and fire, worrying his wife, stealing her oven, borrowing her kettle, haunting forges and factories for opportunity to try his favourable -" craze," till the workmen believed him literally a maniac. He had no means of living, for he would attend to nothing but experi- ments, and sometimes no food, and but for the kindness of the New Englanders he must have starved. His wife had no firing and nothing to cook, and he himself was dressed in a coat of vulcanized India-rubber, which he perpetually brought in contact with the fire, to show that it would stand heat, until it presented an appearance decidedly " unfavourable to its wearer." In the winter of 1839-40, just seven years after the first experiment, -" one of those long and terrible snow-storms for which New England is noted had been raging for many hours, and he awoke one morning to find his little cottage half buried in snow, the storm still continuing, and in his house not an atom of fuel nor a morsel of food. His children were very young, and he was him- self sick and feeble. The charity of his neighbours was exhausted, and he had not the courage to face their reproaches." A friend on this occasion lent him ten pounds, on another he sold his children's books, on a third he sat in his house without food, with five mouths dependent on him, with a dead child waiting burial, and under threat of arrest at any moment for want of bread, and with the knowledge, which he had at last acquired, that to vulcanize India-rubber was a delicate operation, requiring expensive machinery, of the manipulation of which only first-class workmen are capable.
Still he persevered, begging, borrowing, and now and then tempt- ing a partner into a speculation which, as he honestly believed, pro- mised boundless wealth. Two brothers, named Rider, found him means and then failed, Mr. de Forrest found him means and the in- ventor was arrested for old debts, and it was not till 1844, when ten years of his life and his whole property, and many creditors' pro- perty, and nine thousand pounds advanced by Mr. de Forrest had been expended, that he at last perfected his invention, and the Whole country began paying him royalties for the use of his dis- coveries. The manufacture of his shoes alone rose to a, million and a half pairs a year, but he had been compelled to gall his rights too low—a cent a pair—his health had been fatally iejured by close application, and though he lived te see his India-rubber applied to five hundred uses and give employment to 60,000 hands, he never made a fortune. Foreign countries would not respect his patents, and at home they were too wild for trade activity to tolerate. Who, for instance, was going to pay a wretched inventor for making the only material which renders possible a perfect joint, a joint which will not permit the escape of steam, although without it half the engines in use could never be made ? At the London Exhibition he had a suite of three apartments, carpeted, furnished, and decorated only with India-rubber. He did not get paid for half of them, and died insolvent, while Con- gress, saturated with newspaper articles asserting that he had made 4,000,000/., all paid for by the interested trades, refused an extension of his patents to his wife and family. It is always so with inventors under patent laws, and yet how would it have been possible without them to obtain any reward at all to keep any property in his idea, even for a week ? Every artisan he taught would have been a rival manufacturer, every partner he took in have tried tb reap the whole benefit of his brains.
The biographer of Charles Goodyear declares him to have been as modest a man as he was persevering and inventive, but we can- not follow him in his analysis. Believing conceit when decently well-founded to be a perfectly innocent kind of force, we incline to call him conceited—a man who believed without reason that he was doing a special work in the world. He asserted often, and we have not the slightest doubt felt, that he was " called" to make perfect India-rubber, published his own autobiography in a book of his own material, which he believed to be indestructible even by time—a point he had no possible means of testing—and on one occasion was made wretched by a statement that throughout the world twenty persons were drowned every hour. " For several nights he was restless, as was usually the case with him when he was meditating a new application of his material. As these periods of incubation were usually followed by a prostrating sickness, his wife urged him to forbear, and endeavour to compose his mind to sleep. Sleep said he, ' how can I sleep while twenty human beings are drowning every hour, and I am the man who can save them ? " There was vanity in that I, but it was vanity of the kind which the world may well tolerite, since it results only in benefits to itself, the vanity of the inventor, who in the debtors' prison, as in the mansion, still finds consolation in the thought, " I by myself, I " have added somewhat to the re- sources of mankind. Had it been only a mouse-trap it would still perhaps have been better work than that of the man who artistically and intellectually criticizes mouse-traps, but in two at least of its applications Goodyear's patent was a distinct benefit to his kind. It helps more perhaps than any other single dis- covery to preserve the health of armies, and it has supplied the material needed to give the steam-engine its fullest development.
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