Made In America - Bill Bryson [59]
Finally in 1843, entirely by accident, he had his breakthrough. He spilled some India rubber and sulphur on the top of his stove and in so doing discovered the secret of producing a rubber that was waterproof, pliant, resistant to extremes of heat and cold, made an ideal insulator, didn’t break when dropped or struck, and, above all, was practically odourless. Goodyear hastily secured a patent and formed the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company. At long last he and his family were poised for the fame and fortune that their years of sacrifice so clearly warranted.
It was not to be. Goodyear’s process was so easily duplicated that other manufacturers simply stole it. Even the name by which the process became known, vulcanization, was coined by an English pirate. Goodyear had endless problems protecting his patents. The French gave him a patent but then withdrew it on a technicality, and when he travelled to France to protest the matter, he found himself tossed yet again into a debtors’ prison. He made more money from his autobiography – a book with the slightly less than compelling title Gum-Elastic – than he ever did from his invention. When he died in 1860, he left his family saddled with debts.21 The company that proudly bears his name, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, had nothing to do with him or his descendants. It was named Goodyear by two brothers in Akron, Ohio, Frank and Charles Seiberling, who simply admired him.22
Many of the most prolific and important inventors of the age are now almost wholly forgotten. One such was Walter Hunt, who took out patents by the score on fountain-pens, a process for manufacturing paper collars, a machine to make nails and rivets, and the prototype of the breech-loading Winchester rifle. Perhaps his most lasting invention was the safety pin, which he devised in 1849 after a couple of hours of fiddling with a piece of wire. Never much of a businessman, he immediately sold the rights to the device for $400. Slightly earlier, but in much the same mould, was Eli Whitney. While still a youth, he had devised novel processes for manufacturing nails, pins and men’s walking-sticks, and later in life would be instrumental in developing the idea of interchangeable mass-produced parts, an approach that came to be known as the uniformity, or Whitney, system. But what he is chiefly remembered for is the cotton gin, and rightly so. It was one of the great inventions of the age. If you have ever wondered how an intoxicating drink became associated with a device for combing cotton the answer is it didn’t. Gin is merely a shortening of engine.
Whitney hit upon the invention while visiting a cotton plantation in Georgia. As a New Englander unacquainted with the region, Whitney took a keen interest in how the plantation worked, and was immediately struck by how slow and labour-intensive was the process of deseeding cotton by hand. He knocked together a contraption that consisted essentially of two contra-rotating drums with teeth that effectively parted the cotton from the seeds. It was ingeniously simple, but it transformed the plantation economy of the South. Indeed, perhaps no other simple invention in history other than the wheel has had a more sensational and immediate payback in terms of increased efficiency. A single gin could do the work of a thousand slaves. In ten years, exports of cotton from the South increased from 189,500 pounds to 41 million pounds. Slavery across large parts of the South was suddenly not just morally indefensible but economically unnecessary. But what is notable here is that Whitney wasn’t thinking of a revolutionary device that would alter history or secure his fortune – at least not at first – but of a simple machine that would make a friend’s life simpler and more efficient.
When it did occur to Whitney that the gin was revolutionary and that there ought to be money in it, he hastily secured a patent. As so often with nineteenth-century inventors,