Inventions in the Century

The modes of treating this milky juice varies among the natives of the several countries where the trees abound. In Africa they cut or strip the bark, and as the milk oozes out the natives catch and smear it thickly over their limbs and bodies, and when it dries pull it off and cut it into blocks for transportation. In Brazil the juice is collected in clay vessels and smoked and dried in a smouldering fire of palm nuts, which gives the material its dark brown appearance. They mould the softened rubber over clay patterns in the form of shoes, jars, vases, tubes, etc., and as they are sticky they carry them separated on poles to the large towns and sea ports and sell them in this condition. It was some such articles that first attracted the attention of Europeans, who during the eighteenth century called the attention of their countrymen to them.

It was in 1736 that La Condamine described rubber to the French Academy. He afterward resided in the valley of the Amazon ten years, and then he and MM. Herissent, Macquer, and Grossat, again by their writings and experiments interested the scientific and commercial world in the matter.

In 1770 Dr. Priestley published the fact that this rubber had become notable for rubbing out pencil marks, bits of it being sold for a high price for that purpose. About 1797, some Englishman began to make water-proof varnish from it, and to take out patents for the same. This was as far as the art had advanced in caoutchouc, or rubber, in the eighteenth century.

In 1819 Mr. Mackintosh, of Glasgow, began experimenting with the oil of naphtha obtained from gas works as a solvent for India rubber; and so successfully that he made a water-proof varnish which was applied to fabrics, took out his patent in England in 1823, and thus was started the celebrated "Mackintoshes."

In 1825 Thomas C. Wales, a merchant of Boston, conceived the idea of sending American boot and shoe lasts to Brazil for use in place of their clay models. This soon resulted in sending great quantities of rubber overshoes to Europe and America.

The importation of rubber and the manufacture of water-proof garments and articles therefrom now rapidly increased in those countries. But nothing that could be done would prevent the rubber from getting soft in summer and hard and brittle in the winter. Something was needed to render the rubber insensible to the changes of temperature.

For fifty years, ever since the manufacturers and inventors of Europe and America had learned of the water-proof character of rubber, they had been striving to find something to overcome this difficulty. Finally it became the lot of one man to supply the want. His name was Charles Goodyear.

Born with the century, in New Haven, Connecticut, and receiving but a public school education, he engaged with his father in the hardware business in Philadelphia. This proving a failure, he, in 1830, turned his attention to the improvement of rubber goods. He became almost a fanatic on the subject – going from place to place clad in rubber fabrics, talking about it to merchants, mechanics, scientists, chemists, anybody that would listen, making his experiments constantly; deeply in debt on account of his own and his father's business failures, thrown into jail for debt for months, continuing his experiments there with philosophical, good-natured persistence; out of jail steeped to his lips in poverty; his family suffering for the necessaries of life; selling the school books of his children for material to continue his work, and taking a patent in 1835 for a rubber cement, which did not help him much. Finding that nitric acid improved the quality of the rubber by removing its adhesiveness, he introduced this process, which met with great favour, was applied generally to the manufacture of overshoes, and helped his condition. But his trials and troubles continued. Finally one Nathaniel Haywood suggested the use of sulphurous acid gas, and this was found an improvement; but still the rubber would get hard in winter, and although not so soft in summer, yet the odour was offensive. Yet by the use of this improvement he was enabled to raise more money to get Haywood a patent for it, while he became its owner. In the midst of his further troubles, and while experimenting with the sulphur mixed with rubber he found by accidental burning or partly melting of the two together on a stove, that the part in which the sulphur was embedded was hard and inelastic, and that the part least impregnated with the sulphur was proportionately softer and more elastic. At last the great secret was discovered!

And now at this later day, when $50,000,000 worth of rubber goods are made annually in the United States alone, the whole immense business is still divided into but two classes – hard and soft – hard or vulcanized like that called "ebonite," or soft, it may be, as a delicate wafer. And these qualities depend on and vary as a greater or less amount of sulphur is used, as described in the patents of Goodyear, commencing with his French patent of 1844.

Then of course the pirates began their attacks, and he was kept poor in defending his patents, and died comparatively so in 1860; but happy in his great discovery. He had received, however, the whole world's honours – the great council medal at the Nations Fair in London in 1851 the Cross of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon III., and lesser tributes from other nations.

It can be imagined the riches that flowed into the laps of Goodyear's successors; the wide field opened for new inventions in machines and processes; and the vast added comforts to mankind resulting from Goodyear's introduction of a new and useful material to man. – A material which, takes its place and stands in line with wood, and leather, and glass, and iron, and steel!

But rubber and steel as we now know them are not the only new fabrics given to mankind by the inventors of the Nineteenth Century.

The work of the silk worm has been rivalled; and a wool as white and soft as that clipped from the cleanest lamb has been drawn by the hands of these magicians from the hot and furious slag that bursts from a blast furnace.

The silk referred to is made from a solution of that inflammable material of tremendous force known as gun-cotton, or pyroxylin. Dr. Chardonnet was the inventor of the leading form of the article, which he introduced and patented about 1888. The solution made is of a viscous character, allowed to escape from a vessel through small orifices in fine streams; and as the solvent part evaporates rapidly these fine streams become hard, flexible fibres, which glisten with a beautiful lustre and can be used as a substitute for some purposes for the fine threads spun by that mysterious master of his craft – the silk worm.

The gusts of wind that drove against the molten lava thrown from the crater of Kilauea, producing as it did, a fall of white, metallic, hairy-like material resembling wool, suggested to man an industrial application of the same method. And at the great works of Krupp at Essen, Prussia, for instance, may be witnessed a fine stream of molten slag flowing from an iron furnace, and as it falls is met by a strong blast of cold air which transforms it into a silky mass as white and fine as cotton.