238 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



[February 1, 1913. 



died away, he presented the first invited speaker of the evening 

 as follows : 



"There is no name more familiar to the rubber trade than 

 'Goodyear.' Charles Goodyear left us a heritage, not only his 

 name, but his patents and his accomplishments. Contemporaries 

 seldom do true justice, for historians have a clearer perspective, 

 and it is not strange that the movement for a memorial to 

 Charles Goodyear is fast becoming a reality. 



"I have the honor to introduce Professor Franklin W. Hooper, 

 the director of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences." 



PROFESSOK HOOPER'S TRIBUTE TO CHARLES GOODYEAR. 



I speak with great hesitation, realizing as I do, not only 

 the importance of my theme, but the fact that I am speaking 

 to representatives of the great rubber industry of the world. 

 You represent an industry, the raw material of which amounts 

 to $250,000,000 a year; while its manufactured product exceeds 

 half a billion a year in value. It is an industry, moreover, whose 

 applications to our modern life have increased with tremendous 

 rapidity during the last two or three years. And yet, if it were 

 not for one man this great industry would not exist, and neither 

 you nor I would be here tonight. Therefore, we must con- 

 template, not only with a profound personal interest, but with 

 most thankful hearts, the life of this great .A.merican. 



Charles Goodyear is at once the greatest American discoverer, 

 the greatest /Xmerican inventor, and a man whose character and 

 career place him in the foremost rank of men in all time. His 

 father before him had shown the genius of the inventor as a 

 hardware merchant in New Haven where he made and sold for 

 the first time in this country farming tools made of steel. Charles 

 Goodyear's education was very largely received in his father's 

 store. Shortly after he reached his majority he established for 

 himself a hardware store in Philadelphia where he sold for the 

 first time goods manufactured only by American industry. In 

 a few years he built up a large and successful business, a business 

 which he sold to others and which was the foundation of the 

 present large hardware business of Philadelphia. But Charles 

 Goodyear, like Louis Agassiz, was not content simply to make 

 money. He had within him an unquenchable desire, an all im- 

 pelling purpose to be of some great service to humanity. He 

 would have been glad to be able to acquire an education and to 

 enter the ministry, but failing that he sought some material means 

 of benefiting his fellowmen. 



He had observed a good deal of crude rubber, in the use of 

 a poor kind of shoe, made in the tropics, worn by very poor 

 people. He conceived the idea that this material, existing in 

 enormous quantities, might be made of the greatest possible 

 service, not only in the manufacture of shoes and of wearing 

 apparel, but of boats, sails and of life-saving apparatus. He 

 studied its qualities, its solubility, and he sought to make out of 

 the crude rubber a material that would resist ordinary heat. He 

 made machinery with which layers of crude rubber of varying 

 thicknesses could be produced. He applied nitrous fumes to 

 the surfaces of the films so that they were less easily melted by 

 heat. He mixed magnesia, lime, oxide of lead, and many sub- 

 stances with the rubber in most intimate ways, and was able to 

 manufacture fabrics very beautiful in appearance, but never- 

 theless fabrics which softened and decayed in warm weather. For 

 ten long years, 1834 to 1844, he experimented, giving his entire 

 time and energies in his search for some means of converting 

 rubber into a permanently usable and useful article. 



But it was not until 1844 that Charles Goodyear discovered, 

 during the course of his researches, that by heating crude rubber, 

 mixed with sulphur, to a high temperature it was converted into 

 vulcanite — the rubber of modern commerce. This discovery was 

 the triumph of long years of the most painstaking and most 

 manifold experiment during which he had suffered in health, 

 had experienced extreme poverty and privation, and through the 

 failure of others to meet their obligations had been involved 



in debt, and according to the custom of the time had with un- 

 broken spirit endured the hardships of the (n.'..;..::' prison in 

 Philadelphia. 



The discovery once made, Goodyear gave the remainder of 

 his life, 1844 to 1860, to the invention of ways in which the 

 vulcanite could be used. At the time of his decease it had been 

 applied to some two hundred different and distinct uses, and of 

 these over ninety per cent, w^re the direct product of his in- 

 ventive genius. In fact, there has been since his decease no 

 important invention for the use of rubber that was not known 

 to Goodyear. The rubber tire which now consumes so large 

 a part of our annual production is but a modification of the 

 rubber tube which Goodyear made. Throughout his entire career 

 he entered into no manufacturing business with the ulterior 

 motive of making money. He invented the machinery with which 

 more than two hundred vulcanite products were manufactured 

 and used the income from his patents and from his sales of 

 manufactured goods in further invention and in making further 

 machinery for manufacturing. 



In 1851 he exhibited at the Crystal Palace, at Sydenham, many 

 products of his skill and invention, and in 1854, at the Inter- 

 national Exposition in Paris, he was not only awarded the Gold 

 Medal of the E.xposition, but he also received the decoration 

 from Napoleon III. of the Legion of Honor — the highest com- 

 bined compliments that have ever been paid to any American 

 at an International Exposition in Europe. 



But in Europe, as in America, Goodyear was unfortunate in 

 making collections due to him, was unable to meet his notes, 

 and the honors conferred by the Exposition and the Emperor 

 were delivered to him in the debtor's prison in Paris. 



Charles Goodyear, I have said, was the greatest of American 

 discoverers and inventors. But great as was the work of Good- 

 year as discoverer and inventor, the character and career of the 

 man are even more remarkable and exceptional. He was simple, 

 earnest, patient, long-suffering, heroic, magnanimous, and he 

 gave himself as fully for his fellow-men as any patriot or martyr 

 in any time. And it is especially because of the quality of the 

 man, added to his pre-eminent discovery and inventions, and to 

 his great and lasting services that a suitable memorial to Charles 

 Goodyear should be erected for the instruction and the uplifting 

 of all the generations of men that follow. 



A few years after the decease of Charles Darwin, I visited 

 for the first time the great Natural History Museum at South 

 Kensington. The buildings were new and stretched several 

 hundred feet on either side of the main entrance. I had been 

 a student of Charles Darwin for twenty years and had come 

 to feel the power of his simple life — the far-reaching value of 

 the theory of evolution as a mode by which the Creator had 

 brought the universe to its present condition. I felt then as I 

 feel now that .Charles Darwin was the greatest genius and 

 benefactor of the nineteenth century. With this feeling I entered 

 the vast vestibule of this Museum and there unexpectedly found 

 resting on the first landing of the main stairway, in the place 

 of honor in the entire Museum, the statue of Charles Darwin. 

 England and the entire world had ridiculed this student of nature, 

 and yet within a third of a century of the date of his great work 

 on the "The Origin of Species," the whole world had recognized 

 the character of the man, the value of his great contribution to 

 the sum of human knowledge, and had honored him by giving 

 to his statue a place of supreme worth. 



Our country is soon to erect on the banks of the Potomac a 

 beautiful temple, inspired by the genius of Greek art, in memory 

 of Abraham Lincoln, and in that temple will stand alone, in 

 enduring bronze, the strong figure of the savior of his country 

 and of her institutions. 



So likewise in the City of Washington, as one of the group 

 of buildings destined to become our great National Museum, 



