t in it, that's Goodyear."

The description was a good one, for that purse had been without a cent
in it for a long time. It was to stay empty for some weary years longer.
For he had not yet discovered the secret of making India-rubber
permanent, as he found when he tried to fill a contract for a hundred
and fifty mail bags ordered by the government. The bags were apparently
perfect, but in less than a month began to soften and ferment and were
thrown back on his hands. All his property was seized and sold for debt;
his family was reduced to the point of starvation, and friends,
relatives and even his wife joined in demanding that he abandon this
useless quest.

Goodyear was in despair, for he had just made another discovery that
seemed to promise success--the discovery that sulphur was the active
"curing" agent for India-rubber, and that it was the sulphuric acid in
aqua fortis which had wrought the changes in rubber which he had noticed
in his experiments. One day, while explaining the properties of a
sulphur-cured piece of rubber to an incredulous crowd in a
country-store, he happened to let it fall on the red-hot stove. To his
amazement it did not melt; it had shrivelled some, but had not softened.
And, at last, he had the key, which was that rubber mixed with sulphur
and subjected to a certain degree of heat, would be rendered impervious
to any extremes of temperature!

But what degree of heat? He experimented in the oven of his wife's
cooking-stove, and in every other kind of oven to which he could gain
access; he induced a brick-layer to make him an oven, paying him in
rubber aprons; he grew yellow and shrivelled, for he and his family were
living upon the charity of neighbors; more than once, there was not a
morsel of food in the house; his friends thought seriously of shutting
him up in an asylum; he tried to get to New York, but was arrested for
debt, and thrown into prison. Even in prison, he tried to interest men
with capital in his discovery, for he needed delicate and expensive
apparatus, and at last two brothers, William and Emory Rider agreed to
advance him a certain sum. The laboratory was built, and in 1844,
Goodyear astonished the world by producing perfect vulcanized
India-rubber with economy and certainty. The long and desperate battle
had been won!

Did he reap a fortune? By no means! In one way or another, he was
defrauded of his patent rights. In England, for instance, another man
who receiv