Made In America - Bill Bryson [58]
America had a long tradition of productive tinkering. Jefferson invented a plough, which secured him a prix d’honneur from a French agricultural academy (though in fact it didn’t actually work very well), and filled Monticello, his classical Virginia mansion, with self-invented contrivances designed to thwart small everyday irritants. Franklin, as everyone knows, was a manic inventor. He gave the world bifocals, the lightning rod, extendable grippers for taking items off high shelves, possibly the rocking-chair and certainly the Franklin stove (though for its first forty years it was more generally known as the Pennsylvania fireplace) – and always, always with a practical bent. ‘What signifies philosophy that does not apply to some use?’ he asked. Like Jefferson, he never profited from any of them.
It was at Jefferson’s insistence that the US Patent Office was set up in 1790. At first, the patent board consisted of the Attorney General, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of War, who were given the job of vetting inventions as an extra little something to keep them occupied between more pressing assignments. They don’t appear to have been run off their feet. In the first year just three patents were issued. (For the record, the first American patent went to a Samuel Hopkins for a new way of making potash.) By 1802, however, patents were pouring in so fast that a proper patent board had to be organized. Suddenly the country teemed with tinkerer-inventors. In other nations, inventions emerged from laboratories. In America they came out of kitchens and tool-sheds. Everyone, it seemed, got in on the act. Even Abraham Lincoln found time to take out a patent (No. 6469: A Device for Buoying Vessels over Shoals).20
Typical of the age was Charles Goodyear, the man who gave the world vulcanised rubber. Goodyear personified most of the qualities of the classic American inventor – total belief in the product, years of sacrifice, blind devotion to an idea – but with one engaging difference. He didn’t have the faintest idea what he was doing. Described by one biographer as a ‘gentle lunatic’, Goodyear in 1834 became fascinated with rubber. It was a wonderfully promising material – pliant, waterproof, rugged and durable – but it had many intractable shortcomings. For one thing, it had a low melting-point. Boots made of rubber were fine in winter, but at the first sign of warm weather they would gooily decompose and quickly begin to stink.
Goodyear decided to make it his life’s work to solve these problems. To say that he became obsessed only begins to hint at the degree of his commitment. Over the next nine years, he sold or pawned everything he owned, raced through his friends’ and family’s money, occasionally resorted to begging, and generally inflicted loving but untold hardship on his long-suffering wife and numerous children. He turned the family kitchen into a laboratory and, with only the most basic understanding of the chemistry involved, frequently filled the house with noxious gases and at least once nearly asphyxiated himself. Nothing he tried worked. To demonstrate the material’s versatility, he took to wearing a suit made entirely of rubber, but this merely underlined its acute malodorousness and its owner’s faltering grip on reality. Amazingly, everyone stood by him. His wife did whatever he asked of her and relatives gladly handed him their fortunes. One brother in-law parted with $46,000 and never whimpered when all it resulted in was tubs of noisome slop. With implacable resolve Goodyear churned out one product after another – rubber mailbags, life-preservers, boots, rainwear – that proved disastrously ineffective. Even with the lavish support of friends and relatives, Goodyear several