, that, as soon as he began to
derive income from his invention, he reassumed his obligations to his
old creditors, and discharged them gradually.

It was not till the year 1844, more than ten years after he began to
experiment, and more than five years after discovering the secret of
vulcanization, that he was able to conduct his process with absolute
certainty, and to produce vulcanized India-rubber with the requisite
expedition and economy. We can form some conception of the
difficulties overcome by the fact, that the advances of Mr. De Forrest
in aid of the experiment reached the sum of forty-six thousand
dollars,--an amount the inventor did not live long enough to repay.

His triumph had been long deferred, and we have seen in part how much
it had cost him. But his success proved to be richly worth its cost.
He had added to the arts, not a new material merely, but a new class
of materials, applicable to a thousand diverse uses. His product had
more than the elasticity of India-rubber, while it was divested of all
those properties which had lessened its utility. It was still
India-rubber, but its surfaces would not adhere, nor would it harden
at any degree of cold, nor soften at any degree of heat. It was a
cloth impervious to water. It was paper that would not tear. It was
parchment that would not crease. It was leather which neither rain nor
sun would injure. It was ebony that could be run into a mould. It was
ivory that could be worked like wax. It was wood that never cracked,
shrunk, nor decayed. It was metal, "elastic metal," as Daniel Webster
termed it, that could be wound round the finger or tied into a knot,
and which preserved its elasticity almost like steel. Trifling
variations in the ingredients, in the proportions, and in the heating,
made it either as pliable as kid, tougher than ox-hide, as elastic as
whalebone, or as rigid as flint.

All this is stated in a moment, but each of these variations in the
material, as well as every article made from them, cost this
indefatigable man days, weeks, months, or years of experiment. It cost
him, for example, several years of most expensive trial to obviate the
objection to India-rubber fabrics caused by the liability of the gum
to peel from the cloth. He tried every known textile fabric, and every
conceivable process before arriving at the simple expedient of mixing
fibre with the gum, by which, at length, the perfect India-rubber
cloth was produced. This in