from a practicable success. He had, indeed, proved that a compound of
sulphur and India-rubber, in proper proportions and in certain
conditions, being subjected for a certain time to a certain degree of
heat, undergoes a change which renders it perfectly available for all
the uses to which he had before attempted in vain to apply it. But it
remained to be ascertained what were those proper proportions, what
were those conditions, what was that degree of heat, what was that
certain time, and by what means the heat could be best applied.

The difficulty of all this may be inferred when we state that at the
present time it takes an intelligent man a year to learn how to
conduct the process with certainty, though he is provided, from the
start, with the best implements and appliances which twenty years'
experience has suggested. And poor Goodyear had now reduced himself,
not merely to poverty, but to isolation. No friend of his could
conceal his impatience when he heard him pronounce the word
India-rubber. Business-men recoiled from the name of it. He tells us
that two entire years passed, after he had made his discovery, before
he had convinced one human being of its value. Now, too, his
experiments could no longer be carried on with a few pounds of
India-rubber, a quart of turpentine, a phial of aquafortis, and a
little lampblack. He wanted the means of producing a high, uniform,
and controllable degree of heat,--a matter of much greater difficulty
than he anticipated. We catch brief glimpses of him at this time in
the volumes of testimony. We see him waiting for his wife to draw the
loaves from her oven, that he might put into it a batch of
India-rubber to bake, and watching it all the evening, far into the
night, to see what effect was produced by one hour's, two hours',
three hours', six hours' baking. We see him boiling it in his wife's
saucepans, suspending it before the nose of her teakettle, and hanging
it from the handle of that vessel to within an inch of the boiling
water. We see him roasting it in the ashes and in hot sand, toasting
it before a slow fire and before a quick fire, cooking it for one hour
and for twenty-four hours, changing the proportions of his compound
and mixing them in different ways. No success rewarded him while he
employed only domestic utensils. Occasionally, it is true, he produced
a small piece of perfectly vulcanized India-rubber; but upon
subjecting other pieces to precisely the same