Goodyear received a letter from a house in Paris, making him a handsome
offer for the use of his process of curing india-rubber with aqua
fortis. Here was a chance for him to rise out of his misery. A year
before he would have closed with the offer, but since then he had
discovered the effects of sulphur and heat on his compound, and had
passed far beyond the aqua-fortis stage. Disappointment and want had not
warped his conscience, and he at once declined to enter into any
arrangements with the French house, informing them that although the
process they desired to purchase was a valuable one, it was about to be
entirely replaced by another which he was then on the point of
perfecting, and which he would gladly sell them as soon as he had
completed it. His friends declared that he was mad to refuse such an
offer; but he replied that nothing would induce him to sell a process
which he knew was about to be rendered worthless by still greater
discoveries.
A few weeks later a terrible snow-storm passed over the land, one of the
worst that New England had ever known, and in the midst of it Goodyear
made the appalling discovery that he had not a particle of fuel or a
mouthful of food in the house. He was ill enough to be in bed himself,
and his purse was entirely empty. It was a terrible position, made
worse, too, by the fact that his friends who had formerly aided him had
turned from him, vexed with his pertinacity, and abandoned him to his
fate. In his despair he bethought him of a mere acquaintance named
Coleridge, who lived several miles from his cottage, and who but a few
days before had spoken to him with more of kindness than he had received
of late. This gentleman, he thought, would aid him in his distress, if
he could but reach his house, but in such a snow the journey seemed
hopeless to a man in his feeble health. Still the effort must be made.
Nerved by despair, he set out and pushed his way resolutely through the
heavy drifts. The way was long, and it seemed to him that he would
never accomplish it. Often he fell prostrate on the snow, almost
fainting with fatigue and hunger, and again he would sit down wearily in
the road, feeling that he would gladly die if his discovery were but
completed. At length, however, he reached the end of his journey, and
fortunately found his acquaintance at home. To this gentleman he told
the story of his discovery, his hopes, his struggles, and his present
sufferings, and implored him to help him. Mr. Coleridge listened to him
kindly, and after expressing the warmest sympathy for him, loaned him
money enough to support his family during the severe weather and to
enable him to continue his experiments.
Seeing no prospect of success in Massachusetts, he now resolved to make
a desperate effort to get to New York, feeling confident that the
specimens he could take with him would convince someone of the
superiority of his new method. He was beginning to understand the cause
of his many failures, but he saw clearly that his compound could not be
worked with certainty without expensive apparatus. It was a very
delicate operation, requiring exactness and promptitude. The conditions
upon which success depended were many, and the failure of one spoiled
all. It cost him thousands of failures to learn that a little acid in
his sulphur caused the blistering; that his compound must be heated
almost immediately after being mixed or it would never vulcanize; that a
portion of white lead in the compound greatly facilitated the operation
and improved the result; and when he had learned these facts, it still
required costly and laborious experiments to devise the best methods of
compounding his ingredients in the best proportions, the best mode of
heating, the proper duration of the heating, and the various useful
effects that could be produced by varying the proportions and the degree
of heat. He tells us that many times when, by exhausting every resource,
he had prepared a quantity of his compound for heating, it was spoiled
because he could not, with his inadequate apparatus, apply the heat soon
enough.
[Illustration: COUNCIL MEDAL OF THE EXHIBITION.
C. GOODYEAR. CLASS XXVIII.
1851.]
To New York, then, he directed his thoughts. Merely to get there cost
him a severer and a longer effort than men in general are capable of
making. First he walked to Boston, ten miles distant, where he hoped to
borrow from an old acquaintance $50, with which to provide for his
family and pay his fare to New York. He not only failed in this, but he
was arrested for debt and thrown into prison. Even in prison, while his
old father was negotiating to procure his release, he labored to
interest men of capital in his discovery, and made proposals for
founding a factory in Boston. Having obtained his liberty, he went to a
hotel and spent a week in vain efforts to effect a small loan. Saturday
night came, and with it his hotel bill, which he had no means of
discharging. In an agony of shame and anxiety, he went to a friend and
entreated the sum of $5 to enable him to return home. He was met with a
point-blank refusal. In the deepest dejection, he walked the streets
till late in the night, and strayed at length, almost beside himself, to
Cambridge, where he ventured to call upon a friend and ask shelter for
the night. He was hospitably entertained, and the next morning walked
wearily home, penniless and despairing. At the door of his house a
member of his family met him with the news that his youngest child, two
years old, whom he had left in perfect health, was dying. In a few hours
he had in his house a dead child, but not the means of burying it, and
five living dependents without a morsel of food to give them. A
storekeeper near by had promised to supply the family, but, discouraged
by the unforeseen length of the father's absence, he had that day
refused to trust them further. In these terrible circumstances he
applied to a friend, upon whose generosity he knew he could rely, one
who never failed him. He received in reply a letter of severe and
cutting reproach, enclosing $7, which his friend explained was given
only out of pity for his innocent and suffering family. A stranger who
chanced to be present when this letter arrived sent them a barrel of
flour, a timely and blessed relief. The next day the family followed on
foot the remains of the little child to the grave.
This was about the darkest hour of poor Goodyear's life, but it was
before the dawn. He managed to obtain $50, with which he went to New
York, and succeeded in interesting two brothers, William and Emory
Rider, in his discoveries. They agreed to advance to him a certain sum
to complete his experiments. By means of this aid he was enabled to keep
his family from want, and his experiments were pursued with greater ease
and certainty. His brother-in-law, William De Forrest, a rich wool
manufacturer, also came to his aid, now that success seemed in view.
Nevertheless, the experiments of that and the following year cost nearly
$50,000. Thanks to this timely aid, he was able in 1844, ten years after
beginning his work, to produce perfect vulcanized india-rubber with
economy and certainty. To the end of his life he was at work, however,
endeavoring to improve the material and apply it to new uses. He took
out more than sixty patents covering different processes of making
rubber goods.
[Illustration: GRANDE MEDAILLE D'HONNEUR.
EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE DE 1855.
Donne pour la Decouverte de la Vulcanisation et Durcissement du
Caoutchouc.
FACSIMILE GOLD.]
If Goodyear had been a man of business instincts and habits, the years
following the completion of his great work might have brought him an
immense fortune; but everywhere he seems to have been unfortunate in
protecting his rights. In France and England he lost his patent rights
by technical defects. In the latter country another man, who had
received a copy of the American patent, actually applied and obtained
the English rights in his own name. Goodyear, however, obtained the
great council medal at the London Exhibition of 1851, a grand medal at
Paris, in 1855, and later the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. In this
country he was scarcely less unfortunate. His patents were infringed
right and left, he was cheated by business associates and plundered of
the profits of his invention. The United States Commissioner of Patents,
in 1858, thus spoke of his losses:
"No inventor, probably, has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so
plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the
parlance of the world as 'pirates.' The spoliation of their incessant
guerrilla warfare upon his defenceless rights has unquestionably
amounted to millions."
Goodyear died in New York in July, 1860, worn out with work and
disappointment. Neither Europe nor America seemed disposed to accord him
any reward or credit for having made one of the greatest discoveries of
the time. Notwithstanding his invention, which has made millions for
those engaged in working it, he died insolvent, and left his family
heavily in debt. A few years after his death an effort was made to
procure from Congress an extension of his patent for the benefit of his
family and creditors. The opposition of the men who had grown rich and
powerful by successfully infringing his rights prevented that august
body from doing justice in the matter and the effort came to nothing.
VII.
JOHN ERICSSON.
Captain John Ericsson, although not by birth an American, rendered such
signal services to this country and lived here for so many years that we
may fairly consider him in the light of an American inventor. The
inventions to which he devoted the best years of his life were made in
this country. He loved America, he died here, and though his ashes have
been sent back to Sweden, the world of Europe, in common with ourselves,
probably thinks of Ericsson as an American.
[Illustration: John Ericsson.]
By the roadside near a mountain hamlet of Central Sweden stands a
pyramid of iron cast from ore dug from the adjacent mines and set upon a
base of granite quarried from the hills which overlook the valley. This
monument bears the information that two brothers, Nils Ericsson and John
Ericsson, were born in a miner's hut at that place, respectively,
January 31, 1802, and July 31, 1803. Nils Ericsson was a man of unusual
distinction, who held high position in Sweden as engineer of the canals
and railroads of the kingdom. The name of his brother is known the world
over. These two notable Swedes were sons of Olof Ericsson, a Swedish
miner. Poverty was one of the bits of good fortune that fell to the lot
of the two boys, and among John's earliest recollections is that of the
seizure of their household effects by the sheriff. The mother was a
woman of intelligence and somewhat acquainted with the literature of her
time. In boyhood John Ericsson worked in the iron mines of Central
Sweden. Machinery was his first love and his last. Before he was eleven
years old, during the winter of 1813, he had produced a miniature
saw-mill of ingenious construction, and had planned a pumping-engine
designed to keep the mines free from water. The frame of the saw-mill
was of wood; the saw-blade was made from a watch-spring and was moved by
a crank made from a broken tin spoon. A file, borrowed from a
neighboring blacksmith, a gimlet, and a jack-knife were the only tools
used in this work. His pumping-engine was a more ambitious affair, to be
operated by a wind-mill.
[Illustration: John Ericsson's Birthplace and Monument.]
The family then lived in the wilderness, surrounded by a pine forest,
where Ericsson's father was engaged in selecting timber for the
lock-gates of a canal. A quill and a pencil were the boy's tools in the
way of drawing materials. He made compasses of birch wood. A pair of
steel tweezers were converted into a drawing-pen. Ericsson had never
seen a wind-mill, but following as well as he could the description of
those who had, he succeeded in constructing on paper the mechanism
connecting the crank of a wind-mill with the pump-lever. The plan,
conceived and executed under such circumstances by a mere boy,
attracted the attention of Count Platen, president of the Gotha Ship
Canal, on which Ericsson's father was employed, and when Ericsson was
twelve years old he was made a member of the surveying party carrying
out the canal work and put in charge of a section. Six hundred of the
royal troops looked for directions in their daily work to this boy, one
of his attendants being a man who followed him with a stool, upon which
he stood to use the surveying instruments. The amusements of this boy
engineer, even at the age of fifteen, are indicated by a portfolio of
drawings made in his leisure moments, giving maps of the most important
parts of the canal, three hundred miles in length, and showing all the
machinery used in its construction. His precocity was, however, the
normal and healthy development of a mind as fond of mechanical
principles as Raphael was of color.
It was in 1811 that Ericsson made his first scale drawing of the famous
Sunderland Iron Bridge, and from that time on his career in Sweden was a
brilliant one. After serving as an engineer upon the Gotha Canal he
became an officer in the Swedish army, from which circumstance he got
his title of captain. Most government work was then done by army
officers, especially in field surveying. The appointments of government
surveyors being offered soon afterward to competitive examination among
the officers of the army, Ericsson went to Stockholm and entered the
lists. Detailed maps of fifty square miles of Swedish territory, still
upon file at Stockholm, show his skill. Though his work as a surveyor
exceeded that of any of his companions, he was not satisfied. He sought
an outlet for his superfluous activity in preparing the drawings and
engraving sixty-four large plates for a work illustrating the Gotha
Canal. His faculty for invention was shown here by the construction of a
machine-engraver, with which eighteen copper-plates were completed by
his own hand within a year.
From engraving young Ericsson turned his attention to experiments with
flame as a means of producing mechanical power, and it is interesting to
note that forty years afterward a large part of his income in this
country was derived from his gas-or flame-engine, thousands of which are
now in use in New York City alone for pumping water up to the tops of
the houses. His early flame-engine, as it was called, turned out so well
that after building one of ten horse-power, he obtained leave of absence
to go to England to introduce the invention. He never returned to Sweden
for any length of time, although he remained a Swede at heart, and many
Swedish orders and decorations have been conferred upon him. In addition
to the monument near Ericsson's birthplace, already mentioned, the
government has erected a granite shaft, eighteen feet high, in front of
the cottage in which he was born. This shaft, bearing the inscription,
"John Ericsson was born here in 1803," was dedicated on September 3,
1867, when work was suspended in the neighboring mines and iron
furnaces, and a holiday was held in honor of Sweden's famous son. Poems
were read, the chief engineer of the mining district delivered an
oration, and Dr. Pallin, a savant from Philipstad, reminded his hearers
that seven cities in Greece contended for the honor of being Homer's
birthplace. "Certificates of baptism did not then exist," said Dr.
Pallin, "and there is no doubt with us as to Ericsson's birthplace; yet
to guard against all accidents we have here placed a record of baptism
weighing eighty thousand pounds." The monument stands on an isthmus
between two lakes surrounded by green hills.
[Illustration: The Novelty Locomotive, built by Ericsson to compete with
Stephenson's Rocket, 1829.]
Ericsson's life in England began in 1826. Fortune did not smile upon his
efforts to introduce his flame-engine, for the coal fire which had to be
used in England was too severe for the working parts of the apparatus.
But Ericsson possessed a capacity for hard work that recognized no
obstacles. He undertook a new series of experiments which resulted
finally in the completion of an engine which was patented and sold to
John Braithwaite. Young Ericsson's capacity for work and for keeping
half a dozen experiments in view at the same time seems to have been as
remarkable in those early days as when he became famous. Records of the
London Patent Office credit him with invention after invention. Among
these were a pumping-engine on a new principle; engines with surface
condensers and no smoke-stack, as applied to the steamship Victory in
1828; an apparatus for making salt from brine; for propelling boats on
canals; a hydrostatic weighing machine, to which the Society of Arts
awarded a prize; an instrument to be used in taking deep-sea soundings;
a file-cutting machine. The list covers some fourteen patented
inventions and forty machines.
Perhaps his most important work at this period was a device for creating
artificial draught in locomotives, to which aid the development of our
railroad owes much. In 1829 the Liverpool & Manchester Railroad offered
a prize of $2,500 for the best locomotive capable of doing certain work.
The prize was taken by Stephenson with his famous Rocket; but his
sharpest competitor in this contest was John Ericsson. Four locomotives
entered the contest. The London _Times_ of October 8, 1829, speaks
highly of the Novelty, the locomotive entered by Messrs. Braithwaite &
Ericsson, saying: "It was the lightest and most elegant carriage on the
road yesterday, and the velocity with which it moved surprised and
amazed every beholder. It shot along the line at the amazing rate of
thirty miles an hour. It seemed indeed to fly, presenting one of the
most sublime spectacles of human ingenuity and human daring the world
ever beheld."
[Illustration: Ericsson on his Arrival in England, aged twenty-three.]
[Illustration: Mrs. John Ericsson, née Amelia Byam.
(From an early daguerreotype.)]
The railroad directors, at whose invitation this test was made, had
asked for ten miles an hour; Ericsson gave them thirty. The excitement
of the witnesses found vent in loud cheers. Within an hour the shares
of the railroad company rose ten per cent., and the young engineer might
well have considered his fortune made. But although he had beaten his
rival ten miles an hour, the judges determined to make traction power,
rather than speed, the critical test, and the prize was awarded to
Stephenson's Rocket, which drew seventeen tons for seventy miles at the
rate of thirteen miles an hour. Stephenson's engine weighed twice as
much as Ericsson's. Nevertheless Ericsson's success with the Novelty was
such as to keep him busy in this particular field. He followed it up
with a steam fire-engine that astonished London at the burning of the
Argyle Rooms, in 1829, when for the first time, as one of the local
papers remarked, "fire was extinguished by the mechanical power of
fire." Another engine, of larger power, built for the King of Prussia,
soon after rendered excellent service in Berlin, and a third was built
for Liverpool in 1830. Ten years afterward the Mechanics' Institute of
New York awarded a gold medal to Ericsson as a prize for the best plan
of a steam-engine.
[Illustration: Exterior View of Ericsson's House, No. 36 Beach Street,
New York, 1890.]
Disappointed in his ill success with inventions pertaining to
locomotives, Ericsson now turned his attention to his early
flame-engine, and the working model of a caloric engine of five-horse
power soon attracted the attention of London. At first there seemed to
be a great future for engines upon this principle, but after many years
of experiments, at great expense, Ericsson found that the principle was
useful only for purposes requiring small power. In 1851 he built a
heat-engine for the ship Ericsson, a vessel two hundred and sixty feet
in length, and tells the result as follows: "The ship after completion
made a successful trip from New York to Washington and back during the
winter season; but the average speed at sea proving insufficient for
commercial purposes, the owners, with regret, acceded to my proposition
to remove the costly machinery, although it had proved perfect as a
mechanical combination. The resources of modern engineering having been
exhausted in producing the motors of the caloric ship, the important
question, Can heated air, as a mechanical motor, compete on a large
scale with steam? has forever been set at rest. The commercial world is
indebted to American enterprise for having settled a question of such
vital importance. The marine engineer has thus been encouraged to renew
his efforts to perfect the steam-engine without fear of rivalry from a
motor depending on the dilation of atmospheric air by heat."
[Illustration: Solar-engine Adapted to the Use of Hot Air.
(Patented as a pumping-engine, 1880.)]
Before leaving this question of heat-engines and passing to the more
important inventions by which Ericsson will be remembered, it may be as
well to say a few words concerning the solar-engines to which he devoted
many years' time, and one of which I saw in operation in the back yard
of the pleasant old house in Beach Street, opposite the freight depot of
the Hudson River Railroad. This house, by the way, which Ericsson
occupied for nearly forty years, faced on St. John's Park, the pleasant
square which was afterward filled up by the railroad company. Toward the
last years of Ericsson's life the neighborhood became anything but a
pleasant one to live in; it was dirty and noisy. Nevertheless Ericsson
refused to move. Perhaps the unpleasantness of the surroundings made him
the recluse he was. It is not surprising that he should have been
attracted by the possibility of obtaining power from the heat of the
sun. In an early pamphlet on the subject he says: "There is a rainless
region extending from the northwestern coast of Africa to Mongolia, nine
thousand miles in length and nearly one thousand miles wide. In the
Western Hemisphere, Lower California, the table-lands of Guatemala, and
the west coast of South America, for a distance of more than two
thousand miles, suffer from a continuous radiant heat." Ericsson
estimated that the mechanical power that would result from utilizing the
solar heat on a strip of land a single mile wide and eight thousand
miles long would suffice to keep twenty-two million solar-engines, of
one hundred horse-power each, going nine hours a day. He believed that
with the exhaustion of European coal-fields the day for the solar-engine
would come, and that those countries which possessed unfailing sunshine,
such as Egypt, would displace England, France, and Germany as the
manufacturing powers of the world, for the European would have to move
his machinery to the borders of the Nile. By concentrating the rays of
the sun upon a small copper boiler filled with air Ericsson was enabled
to work a little motor, and for some years he also attempted to produce
steam by means of heat from the sun. He was not successful, however, in
making anything of commercial value in this direction, and so far as I
have been able to learn none of the tropical countries invited by him to
take up the problem for its own benefit responded to the invitation.