North America. Probably the first rubber this country saw was brought to New England in clipper ships as ballast in the form of crude lumps and balls. Rubber shoes, water-bottles, powder-flasks, and tobacco-pouches found buyers in the American ports, but rubber shoes were most in demand.

Soon some Americans began to import raw rubber and to manufacture rubber goods of their own, and in the old world a Scotchman named Macintosh found a way of waterproofing cloth by spreading on it a thin coating of rubber dissolved in coal naphtha. Many people still refer to raincoats as mackintoshes. Rubber clothing shared favor with rubber shoes, but its popularity was short-lived for it did not wear well and was almost as sensitive to temperature as molasses and butter. The rubber shoes and coats get hard and stiff in winter and soft and sticky in summer. A man wearing a pair of rubber overalls who sat down too near a warm stove soon found that his overalls, his chair and himself were stuck fast together. The first rubber coats became so stiff in cold weather that when you took one off you could stand it up in the middle of the floor and leave it, for it would stand like a tent until the rubber thawed out, and when thawed it was almost as uncomfortable as is fly-paper to the fly.

One day Charles Goodyear, a Connecticut hardware merchant of an inventive turn of mind, went to a store to buy a life preserver. He could find only imperfect ones, but they drew his attention to the study of rubber, and presently he was thinking of it by day and dreaming of it by night. Rubber became a passion with him. He felt sure some way could be found to make it firm yet flexible regardless of temperature, and for ten years he experimented with different mixtures and processes, hoping to find the right one. So intent was he on his search that he found time for nothing else. Due to neglect his business went to pieces and he became very poor.

Finally, in 1839, when he was on the point of giving up in despair, he accidentally came upon the solution. He was experimenting in his kitchen, a place which, through lack of funds, he was often forced to use as a laboratory. Part of a mixture of rubber, sulphur and other chemicals, with which he was working, happened to drop on the top of the stove. It lay there sizzling and charring until the odor of the burning rubber called his attention to it. As he stooped to scrape it off the stove he gave a start of wonder as he noted that a change had come over the rubber during its brief contact with the stove.

To his surprise the mixture had not melted, but had flattened out in the shape of a silver dollar. When it had cooled enough to be handled, he found that it bent and stretched easily, without cracking or breaking, and that it always snapped back to its original shape. Strangest of all, it was no longer sticky. Apparently half the problem was solved. Whether his new mixture would stand the cold he had yet to find out, so he nailed it on the outside of the door and went to bed. Probably he slept but little and was up early. At any rate he found the rubber unaffected by the cold.

Then he knew that he had made a real discovery and he named the process "vulcanizing" after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. "Vulcanizing" means mixing pure rubber with certain chemicals and then applying heat. On this process, which is by no means simple, the great rubber business of the world has been established. Practically everything made of rubber, or of which rubber is a part, has to go through the vulcanizing process, whether it is a pair of Keds, a tire, a fruit jar ring, or a doormat.

So many people had been deceived by previous rubber ventures that Goodyear had great trouble in finding anyone with enough faith to invest money in his discovery. It was some time before he was able to take out the first of the more than sixty patents which he was granted during his lifetime for applying his process to various uses. Under these patents he licensed several factories to use the process in the manufacture of rubber goods, but required them to stamp all goods with the words "Goodyear patent." Scores of companies have since used the name Goodyear, but the only factories that he licensed which are now in existence are parts of the United States Rubber Company.

Goodyear often had to defend his patents in court. In the most famous of these suits, he was defended by Daniel Webster and opposed by Rufus Choate, so that we see interwoven in the story of rubber the names of two of the greatest statesmen this country has produced.

CHAPTER 3

THE HEVEA TREE

For the very first of the rubber story we may thank a little wood-boring beetle, and the way nature has of helping her children to protect themselves.

The thistle of the meadow is as safe from hungry cattle as though fenced in by barbed wire. A cow must be starving that would care to flavor her luncheon with the needles that the thistle bears. The common skunk cabbage would make a tempting meal for her after a winter of dry feeding, had not Nature given it an odor that disgusts even a spring-time appetite. The milkweed welcomes the bees and flies that help to distribute her pollen where she wants it spread, but she has her own way of punishing the useless thieves that trespass up her stalk. Wherever the hooks of an insect's feet pierce her tender skin, she pours out a milky juice to entangle its feet and body, and it is a lucky bug that succeeds in escaping before this juice hardens, and holds him a prisoner condemned to die.

All over the world there are plants with the same ability that the milkweed has, but it is especially true of certain trees and vines of the tropics. As soon as the little beetle begins to bore into the bark of one of these trees, there pours out a sticky, milky fluid that kills the insect at once. If this were all, the wound would remain open, ready for the next robber who came along. In order that the break may be healed, a cement is necessary, but not a hard, unyielding one, for that would crumble away with the motion of the tree in the wind.

So with Mother Nature's perfection in doing things, the very plant juice that has done duty as a poison is hardened into an elastic stopper, with the result that, no matter how far the tree may sway and tug at the wound, the filling gives and stretches, true to the task it has to perform.

This was the juice the crafty savage induced the tree to give up. Wherever the bark was cut, the fluid poured forth to heal the break and hardened like blood on a cut finger. The native caught it while it was still soft and applied it to his simple needs.

This juice is not the sap of the rubber tree. Sap, which is the life-blood of the tree, flows through the wood, but the juice we are describing is contained in the inner bark, a thin layer directly below the outer bark.

Scientific men call this juice latex. It is like milk in three ways: it is white, it contains tiny particles that rise to the top like cream, and it spoils quickly.

The particles in cow's milk are full of fats which make it good for us to drink. But a rubber tree's milk has tiny atoms of rubber and resin and other things, and it took time to discover which of the vines and trees was the prize milker of the tropics and gave the largest amount of pure rubber. Finally, the Hevea, the very tree the Frenchman wrote about, proved to be the best, and, although by no means the only rubber tree of commercial value, it is acknowledged the greatest of rubber trees.

The Hevea tree grows sixty feet tall, and when full grown is eight or ten feet around. It rises as straight as an elm, with high branching limbs and long, smooth oval leaves. Sprays of pale flowers blossom upon it in August, followed in a few months by pods containing three speckled seeds which look like smooth, slightly flattened nutmegs. When the seeds are ready to drop the outer covering of the pod bursts with a loud report,