existing
circumstances in that community The great losses that had been sustained
in the manufacture of gum-elastic: the length of time the inventor
had spent in what appeared to them to be entirely fruitless efforts
to accomplish anything with it; added to his recent misfortunes and
disappointments, all conspired, with his utter destitution, to produce
a state of things as unfavorable to the promulgation of the discovery as
can well be imagined. He, however, felt in duty bound to beg in earnest,
if need be, sooner than that the discovery should be lost to the world
and to himself.... How he subsisted at this period charity alone can
tell, for it is as well to call things by their right names; and it is
little else than charity when the lender looks upon what he parts with
as a gift. The pawning or selling some relic of better days or some
article of necessity was a frequent expedient. His library had long
since disappeared, but shortly after the discovery of this process, he
collected and sold at auction the schoolbooks of his children, which
brought him the trifling sum of five dollars; small as the amount
was, it enabled him to proceed. At this step he did not hesitate. The
occasion, and the certainty of success, warranted the measure which, in
other circumstances, would have been sacrilege."

His itinerary during those years is eloquent. Wherever there was a man,
who had either a grain of faith in rubber or a little charity for a
frail and penniless monomaniac, thither Goodyear made his way. The goal
might be an attic room or shed to live in rent free, or a few dollars
for a barrel of flour for the family and a barrel of rubber for himself,
or permission to use a factory's ovens after hours and to hang his
rubber over the steam valves while work went on. From Woburn in 1839,
the year of his great discovery, he went to Lynn, from Lynn back to the
deserted factory at Roxbury. Again to Woburn, to Boston, to Northampton,
to Springfield, to Naugatuck; in five years as many removes. When he
lacked boat or railway fare, and he generally did, he walked through
winds and rains and drifting snow, begging shelter at some cottage or
farm where a window lamp gleamed kindly.

Goodyear took out his patent in 1844. The process he invented has been
changed little, if at all, from that day to this. He also invented the
perfect India rubber cloth by mixing fiber with the gum a discovery he
considered rightly as secondary in importan