1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [138]
The epicenter of what became known as “rubber fever” was Salem, Massachusetts, north of Boston. In 1825 a young Salem entrepreneur imported five hundred pairs of rubber shoes from Brazil. Ten years later, the number of imported shoes had grown to more than 400,000, about one for every forty Americans. Villagers in tiny hamlets at the mouth of the Amazon molded thousands of shoes to the dictates of Boston merchants. Garments impregnated with rubber were modern, high-tech, exciting—a perfect urban accessory. People flocked to stores.
The crash was inevitable. The idea of impermeable rubber boots and clothes was more exciting than the fact. Rubber simply didn’t work very well. In cold weather, the shoes became brittle; in hot weather, they melted. Boots placed in closets at the end of winter turned into black puddles by fall. The results smelled so bad that people found themselves burying their footgear in the garden. Daniel Webster, the senator and secretary of state, liked to tell the story of how he received a rubber cloak and hat as a gift. He wore them on a cold evening. By the time he reached his destination the cloak had become so rigid that he stood it in the street by the front door. Supposedly he propped the hat on top. “Some decorous gentlemen among us can also remember,” one critic wrote later, “that, in the nocturnal combats of their college days, a flinty India-rubber shoe, in cold weather, was a missive weapon of highly effective character.” Returned goods inundated rubber dealers. Public opinion swung violently against rubber.
Just before the collapse, in 1833, a bankrupt businessman named Charles Goodyear became interested in—and obsessed by—rubber. It was typical of Goodyear’s entrepreneurial acumen that he began to seek financial backing for a rubber venture just at the time investors were planning their exits from the field. A few weeks after Goodyear announced his intent to produce temperature-stable rubber he was thrown into debtor’s prison. In his cell he began work, mashing bits of rubber with a rolling pin. He was untroubled by any knowledge of chemistry but boundlessly determined. For years Goodyear wandered about the northeastern United States in a cloud of penury, trailed by his hungry wife and children, dodging bailiffs and pawning heirlooms. All the while he was mixing toxic chemicals, more or less randomly, in the hope that they would make rubber more stable. The Goodyears lived in an abandoned rubber factory in Staten Island. They lived in an abandoned rubber factory in Massachusetts. They lived in a shack in a Connecticut neighborhood called Sodom Hill (the name indicated its wholesomeness). They lived in a second abandoned rubber factory in Massachusetts. Sometimes the houses had no heat or food. Two of Goodyear’s children died.
Taking his cue from a dream told to him by another rubber obsessive, Goodyear began mixing rubber with sulfur. Nothing happened, he said later, until he accidentally dropped a lump of sulfur-treated rubber onto a wood stove. To his amazement, the rubber didn’t melt. The surface charred, but the inner material changed into a new kind of rubber that retained its shape and elasticity at high temperatures. Goodyear threw himself into reproducing the accident, a task impeded by his inability to afford any laboratory apparatus—he had to traipse from neighbor to neighbor, asking to use their wood stoves. Sometimes the sulfur process worked, sometimes it didn’t. Goodyear kept working, frustrated, hungry, haunted. When he was again thrown into debtor’s prison, he wrote to acquaintances from his cell, asking for supplies “to establish an India rubber factory for myself on