inventor of a process that would keep rubber dry and firm and flexible
in all weathers.

Goodyear felt that he had a call from God. "He who directs the
operations of the mind," he wrote at a later date, "can turn it to the
development of the properties of Nature in his own way, and at the time
when they are specially needed. The creature imagines he is executing
some plan of his own, while he is simply an instrument in the hands of
his Maker for executing the divine purposes of beneficence to the race."
It was in the spirit of a crusader, consecrated to a particular service,
that this man took up the problem of rubber. The words quoted are a
fitting preface for the story of the years that followed, which is
a tale of endurance and persistent activity under sufferings and
disappointments such as are scarcely paralleled even in the pages of
invention, darkened as they often are by poverty and defeat.

Charles Goodyear was born at New Haven, December 29, 1800, the son of
Amasa Goodyear and descendant of Stephen Goodyear who was associated
with Theophilus Eaton, the first governor of the Puritan colony of New
Haven. It was natural that Charles should turn his mind to invention, as
he did even when a boy; for his father, a pioneer in the manufacture of
American hardware, was the inventor of a steel hayfork which replaced
the heavy iron fork of prior days and lightened and expedited the labor
of the fields. When Charles was seven his father moved to Naugatuck and
manufactured the first pearl buttons made in America; during the War
of 1812 the Goodyear factory supplied metal buttons to the Government.
Charles, a studious, serious boy, was the close companion of his father.
His deeply religious nature manifested itself early, and he joined the
Congregational Church when he was sixteen. It was at first his intention
to enter the ministry, which seemed to him to offer the most useful
career of service, but, changing his mind, he went to Philadelphia
to learn the hardware business and on coming of age was admitted
to partnership in a firm established there by his father. The firm
prospered for a time, but an injudicious extension of credit led to
its suspension. So it happened that Goodyear in 1834, when he became
interested in rubber, was an insolvent debtor, liable, under the laws of
the time, to imprisonment. Soon afterward, indeed, he was lodged in the
Debtor's Prison in Philadelphia.

It would seem an inauspicious hour t