And now at this later day, when $50,000,000 worth of rubber goods are made annually in the United States alone, the whole immense business is still divided into but two classes—hard and soft—hard or vulcanized like that called “ebonite,” or soft, it may be, as a delicate wafer. And these qualities depend on and vary as a greater or less amount of sulphur is used, as described in the patents of Goodyear, commencing with his French patent of 1844.
Then of course the pirates began their attacks, and he was kept poor in defending his patents, and died comparatively so in 1860; but happy in his great discovery. He had received, however, the whole world’s honours—the great council medal at the Nations Fair in London in 1851 the Cross of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon III., and lesser tributes from other nations.
It can be imagined the riches that flowed into the laps of Goodyear’s successors; the wide field opened for new inventions in machines and processes; and the vast added comforts to mankind resulting from Goodyear’s introduction of a new and useful material to man.—A material which, takes its place and stands in line with wood, and leather, and glass, and iron, and steel!
But rubber and steel as we now know them are not the only new fabrics given to mankind by the inventors of the Nineteenth Century.
The work of the silk worm has been rivalled; and a wool as white and soft as that clipped from the cleanest lamb has been drawn by the hands of these magicians from the hot and furious slag that bursts from a blast furnace.
The silk referred to is made from a solution of that inflammable material of tremendous force known as gun-cotton, or pyroxylin. Dr. Chardonnet was the inventor of the leading form of the article, which he introduced and patented about 1888. The solution made is of a viscous character, allowed to escape from a vessel through small orifices in fine streams; and as the solvent part evaporates rapidly these fine streams become hard, flexible fibres, which glisten with a beautiful lustre and can be used as a substitute for some purposes for the fine threads spun by that mysterious master of his craft—the silk worm.
The gusts of wind that drove against the molten lava thrown from the crater of Kilauea, producing as it did, a fall of white, metallic, hairy-like material resembling wool, suggested to man an industrial application of the same method. And at the great works of Krupp at Essen, Prussia, for instance, may be witnessed a fine stream of molten slag flowing from an iron furnace, and as it falls is met by a strong blast of cold air which transforms it into a silky mass as white and fine as cotton.