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Lesson One The Development of Rubber Here is a story about rubber. In the early part of the eighteen-hundreds, the Americans made use of natural for the first time. First they made overshoes to keep their feet dry. Then came a certain Mr. Mackintosh, who made coats of cloth covered with natural rubber. But these first rubber overshoes and raincoats were all soft and sticky in summer, and hard and unelastic in the winter when it was cold, the rubber we have today is not sticky but soft and elastic, though very strong-even in the warmest summer and the coldest winter. There would be no automobiles such as we have today without it. But at that time every attempt to make rubber hard and strong come to nothing. The early overshoes and raincoats were simply not good enough and their makers went out of business. Goodyear was living near some of these poor men and he got to work on this question of making rubber hard and strong. Once he started on this work, he was the sort of man who simply had to go on till he had overcome the trouble. First came the discovery that nitric acid (HNO3) made the rubber much better, and in a short time he was doing a small business in rubber shoes produced in this way. Water, a friend of his had the idea that rubber might be made hard and strong if mixed with sulphur and put in the sun. Goodyear put his idea to the test , and saw that it did have more or less the desired effect, but only on the outside of the rubber. It is common knowledge now that the way to make rubber hard and strong-to“vulcanize” it ,as we say , is by heating it with sulphur. Goodyear spent another four years, in which things went very hardly with him, before he made the discovery how to vulcanize rubber completely. When at last he did it, he had nothing left at all. Everything of the smallest value had used to get money, even his children’s school-books. Almost every discovery or invention has come a sort of story behind it though they are not all quite such unhappy stor