SKETCH OF CHARLES GOODYEAR. 691 



business of liis father, and in 1824 married Clarissa Beeclicr. She 

 was devoted to her husband, and endured without complaint the hard 

 vicissitudes of life which befell them in his long pursuit of his dis- 

 covery. In 1826 he opened a store in Philadelphia for the sale of 

 hardware, principally the products of their own factory. It was the 

 first for the sale of domestic hardware in the country. Under his 

 management the house acquired an ample fortune, but failed in 

 1830. It was a great trial to Goodyear, yet he submitted without 

 regrets or loss of courage to what he considered providential. 



The next ten years he was repeatedly arrested for debt, not wish- 

 ing to take the benefit of the bankrupt law. He strove to com- 

 plete his inventions in hardware, and from the sale of one of them, 

 completed in prison, obtained temporary subsistence. He does not 

 seem to have been depressed, but rather to have grown stronger by 

 reliance on a clear conscience and a lofty purpose. Soon after his 

 reduction from affluence to poverty he decided to devote himself to 

 invention; partly because he felt it would be difficult for him to get 

 rid of the epithets " inventor " and " visionary," so often considered 

 synonymous. Moreover, he is said to have felt himself divinely 

 called by his aptitude, his past course, his circumstances, and a strong 

 inward impulse. 



As a schoolboy his attention was drawn to the mysterious prop- 

 erty of India rubber. A thin pellicle peeled from a bottle attracted 

 his notice, and suggested that it would be very useful as a fabric if it 

 could be made uniformly so thin and so prepared as to prevent its 

 adhering together and becoming a solid mass, as it soon did from 

 the warmth and pressure of the hand. So his mind was dwelling 

 upon the problem before Thomas Hancock in England made his 

 first unsatisfactory solutions of rubber in oil of turpentine about 

 1819. The substance began to be known in the United States in 

 1820; its manufacture to attract attention about 1831. 



Modern Europe was unacquainted 'with rubber until the dis- 

 covery of America. Uncertainty reigned, some supposing it of 

 animal origin, until 1736. From that time savants busied them- 

 selves with it. Hancock introduced the first mechanical processes 

 (from 1818), molding, ink-erasers, etc.; Mackintosh his benzene solu- 

 tion and garments in 1823. The shoes made by the South American 

 Indians had been favorably received in Europe; but, at the critical 

 period in the United States, and likewise from deterioration of the 

 gum, the public was abandoning them and many other articles of 

 rubber fabrication. 



In the United States rubber became a subject of investigation, 

 and Dr. Comstock obtained a patent in 1828 for its solution in oil of 

 turpentine and its application to stuffs. The first practical success 



