re, descriptions of the
new life-preservers made of India-rubber, an application of the gum
that was much extolled. Curiosity induced him to enter the store to
examine the life-preservers. He bought one and took it home with him.
A native of Connecticut, he possessed in full measure the Yankee
propensity to look at a new contrivance, first with a view to
understand its principle, and next to see if it cannot be improved.
Already he had had some experience both of the difficulty of
introducing an improved implement, and of the profit to be derived
from its introduction. His father, the head of the firm of A. Goodyear
and Sons, of which he was a member, was the first to manufacture
hay-forks of spring steel, instead of the heavy, wrought-iron forks
made by the village blacksmith; and Charles Goodyear could remember
the time when his father reckoned it a happy day on which he had
persuaded a farmer to accept a few of the new forks as a gift, on the
condition of giving them a trial. But it was also very fresh in his
recollection that those same forks had made their way to almost
universal use, had yielded large profits to his firm, and were still a
leading article of its trade, when, in 1830, the failure of Southern
houses had compelled it to suspend. He was aware, too, that, if
anything could extricate the house of A. Goodyear and Sons from
embarrassment, it was their possession of superior methods of
manufacturing and their sale of articles improved by their own
ingenuity.

Upon examining his life-preserver, an improvement in the inflating
apparatus occurred to him. When he was next in New York he explained
his improvement to the agent of the Roxbury Company, and offered to
sell it. The agent, struck with the ingenuity displayed in the new
contrivance, took the inventor into his confidence, partly by way of
explaining why the Company could not then buy the improved tube, but
principally with a view to enlist the aid of an ingenious mind in
overcoming a difficulty that threatened the Company with ruin. He told
him that the prosperity of the India-rubber Companies in the United
States was wholly fallacious. The Roxbury Company had manufactured
vast quantities of shoes and fabrics in the cool months of 1833 and
1834, which had been readily sold at high prices; but during the
following summer, the greater part of them had melted. Twenty thousand
dollars' worth had been returned, reduced to the consistency of common
gum, and