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The rubber "biscuit" is cut from the paddle with a wet knife when the desired thickness has been attained. Goodyear lived for sixteen years after his discovery of the vulcanization process. During the last six he was unable to walk without crutches. He was indifferent to money. To make his discoveries of still greater service to mankind was his whole aim.
Having sent specimens of vulcanized fabrics to Charles Mackintosh & Co., in 1842, and having opened with them a negotiation for the sale of the secret of the invention or discovery, one of the partners of that firm, named Thomas Hancock, availing himself, as he admits, of the hints and opportunities thus presented to him, rediscovered, as he affirms, the process of vulcanization, and described it in a patent for England, which was enrolled on May 21, 1844, about five weeks after the specification and publication of the discovery to the world by Goodyear's patent for vulcanization in France.
No fewer than nineteen patents were granted in the United States for "improvements in devulcanizing India rubber," or "restoring waste vulcanized rubber," beginning in 1855, or eleven years after the date of Goodyear's patent for the vulcanization process.
The India-rubber shoe, as we now have it, is an admirable article, light, strong, elegant in shape, with a fibrous sole that does not readily wear, cut, or slip. As the shoe is made and joined before vulcanization, a girl can make twenty-five pairs in a day. They are cut from the soft sheets of gum and joined by a slight pressure of the hand.
Notwithstanding his great invention an invention which has made millions for those engaged in its manufacture he died insolvent, and left his family heavily in debt. A few years after his death an effort was made to procure from Congress a further seven years' extension of his patent for vulcanization, for the benefit of his family and his creditors.
To-day it has 21,000 offices, sends each year some 58,000,000 messages, receives about $23,000,000, and does seven eighths of all the telegraph business in the United States. India Rubber.% The same year which witnessed the introduction of the telegraph saw the perfection of Goodyear's secret for the vulcanization of India rubber.
Finally, rubber recovered by the chemical process, it is claimed, is harder than that obtained by any other; so that it is usual to add, during vulcanization, in order to soften the product, the residuum obtained from petroleum manufactures, or palm or other oils. Unvulcanized rubber clippings also have been used for this purpose.
And the patent of Hancock, held good according to a peculiarity of English law, thus superseded Goodyear's English patent for vulcanization, which bore date a few days later. Goodyear, however, obtained the great council medal of the exhibition of all nations at London, the grand medal of the world's exhibition at Paris, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, presented by Napoleon III."
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 importance only to vulcanization. When he died in 1860 he had taken out sixty patents on rubber manufactures.
Soon after the vulcanization of rubber became fully established, attempts began to be made to "devulcanize" the scrap and cuttings of rubber which accumulated in the factories.
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