the failure
of one spoiled all. To vulcanize India-rubber is about as difficult as
to make perfect bread; but the art of bread-making was the growth of
ages, and Charles Goodyear was only ten years and a half in perfecting
his process. Thousands of ingenious men and women, aided by many happy
accidents, must have contributed to the successive invention of bread;
but he was only one man, poor and sick. It cost him thousands of
failures to learn that a little acid in his sulphur caused the
blistering; that his compound must be heated almost immediately after
being mixed, or it would never vulcanize; that a portion of white lead
in the compound greatly facilitated the operation and improved the
result; and when he had learned these facts, it still required costly
and laborious experiments to devise the best methods of compounding
his ingredients, the best proportions, the best mode of heating, the
proper duration of the heating, and the various useful effects that
could be produced by varying the proportions and the degree of heat.
He tells us that many times, when, by exhausting every resource, he
had prepared a quantity of his compound for heating, it was spoiled
because he could not, with his inadequate apparatus, apply the heat
soon enough.

To New York, then, he directed his thoughts. Merely to get there cost
him a severer and a longer effort than men in general are capable of
making. First he walked to Boston, ten miles distant, where he hoped
to be able to borrow from an old acquaintance fifty dollars, with
which to provide for his family and pay his fare to New York. He not
only failed in this, but he was arrested for debt and thrown into
prison. Even in prison, while his father was negotiating to secure his
release, he labored to interest men of capital in his discovery, and
made proposals for founding a factory in Boston. Having obtained his
liberty, he went to a hotel, and spent a week in vain efforts to
effect a small loan. Saturday night came, and with it his hotel bill,
which he had no means of discharging. In an agony of shame and
anxiety, he went to a friend, and entreated the sum of five dollars to
enable him to return home. He was met with a point-blank refusal. In
the deepest dejection, he walked the streets till late in the night,
and strayed at length, almost beside himself, to Cambridge, where he
ventured to call upon a friend and ask shelter for the night. He was
hospitably entertained, and the nex