e surface of the rubber
had been "cured."

This failure was the last straw, as far as Goodyear's friends were
concerned. Only his patient and devoted wife stood by him; she had
labored, known want, seen her children go hungry to school, but she
seems never to have reproached her husband nor to have doubted his
ultimate success. The gentleness and tenderness of his deportment in the
home made his family cling to him with deep affection and bear willingly
any sacrifice for his sake; though his successive failures generally
meant a return of the inventor to the debtor's prison and the casting of
his family upon charity.

The nitric acid process had not solved the problem but it had been a
real step forward. It was in the year 1839, by an accident, that he
discovered the true process of vulcanization which cured not the surface
alone but the whole mass. He was trying to harden the gum by boiling it
with sulphur on his wife's cookstove when he let fall a lump of it on
the red hot iron top. It vulcanized instantly. This was an accident
which only Goodyear could have interpreted. And it was the last. The
strange substance from the jungles of the tropics had been mastered.
It remained, however, to perfect the process, to ascertain the accurate
formula and the exact degree of heat. The Goodyears were so poor during
these years that they received at any time a barrel of flour from a
neighbor thankfully. There is a tradition that on one occasion, when
Goodyear desired to cross between Staten Island and New York, he had to
give his umbrella to the ferry master as security for his fare, and that
the name of the ferry master was Cornelius Vanderbilt, "a man who made
much money because he took few chances." The incident may easily have
occurred, though the ferry master could hardly have been Vanderbilt
himself, unless it had been at an earlier date. Another tradition
says that one of Goodyear's neighbors described him to an inquisitive
stranger thus: "You will know him when you see him; he has on an India
rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and shoes, and an India rubber purse
WITHOUT A CENT IN IT!"

Goodyear's trials were only beginning. He had the secret at last, but
nobody would believe him. He had worn out even the most sanguine of his
friends. "That such indifference to this discovery, and many incidents
attending it, could have existed in an intelligent and benevolent
community," wrote Goodyear later, "can only be accounted for by