It
presently transpired that severe frost stiffened them to the
rigidity of granite. Daniel Webster had had some experience in
this matter himself. "A friend in New York," he said, "sent me a
very fine cloak of India Rubber, and a hat of the same material.
I did not succeed very well with them. I took the cloak one day
and set it out in the cold. It stood very well by itself. I
surmounted it with the hat, and many persons passing by supposed
they saw, standing by the porch, the Farmer of Marshfield."
It was in the year 1834, shortly after the Roxbury manufacturers
had come to realize that their process was worthless and that
their great fortune was only a mirage, and just before these
facts became generally known, that Charles Goodyear made his
entrance on the scene. He appeared first as a customer in the
company's store in New York and bought a rubber life-preserver.
When he returned some weeks later with a plan for improving the
tube, the manager confided to him the sad tragedy of rubber,
pointing out that no improvement in the manufactured articles
would meet the difficulty, but that fame and fortune awaited the
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.
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