t only a curiosity, and few people knew
there was such a thing.

About the year 1770, a black, bouncing ball of caoutchouc, as the
Indians called the gum, after many travels found its way to
England, and Priestley, the man who gave us oxygen, learned that
it would rub out pencil marks. Then and there he named it what you
have probably guessed long before this: "rub-ber." Nearly every
language except English uses in place of the word rubber some form
of the native Word "caoutchouc," which means "weeping tree." After
Priestley's discovery, a one-inch "rubber" sold for three
shillings, or about seventy-five cents, but artists were glad to
pay even that price, because their work was made so much easier.

CHAPTER 2

CHARLES GOODYEAR

In 1800 Brazil was the only country manufacturing rubber articles,
and her best market soon proved to be 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 w