The struggle which Morse made to perfect and secure public recognition of his telegraph and the injustice shown Eli Whitney by the people of the South, were as nothing when compared with the trials of that most unfortunate of all inventors, Charles Goodyear, whose story is one of the most tragic in American annals. No one can read of his struggles without experiencing the deepest admiration for a man who, at the time, was regarded as a hopeless lunatic. Charles Goodyear was born at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1800. While he was still a child, his father moved to Philadelphia and engaged in the hardware business, in which his son joined him, as soon as he was old enough to do so. But the panic of 1836 wiped the business out of existence, and Goodyear was forced to look around for some other means of livelihood. He had been interested for some time in the wonderful success of some newly-established India-rubber companies, and, out of curiosity, bought an India-rubber life-preserver. Upon examining it, he found a defect in the valve, and inventing an improvement in it, he went to New York with the intention of selling his improvement to the manufacturer. The manufacturer was impressed with the new device, but told Goodyear frankly that the whole India-rubber business of the country was on the verge of collapse, and indeed, the collapse came a few months later. The trouble was that the goods which the rubber companies had been turning out were not durable. The use of rubber had begun about fifteen years before, first in France in the manufacture of garters and suspenders, and then in England where a manufacturer named Mackintosh made water-proof coats by spreading a layer of rubber between two layers of cloth. Then, in 1833, the Roxbury India-Rubber Company was organized in the United States, and manufactured an India-rubber cloth from which wagon-covers, caps, coats, and other articles were made. Its success was so great that other companies were organized and seemed on the highroad to fortune, when a sudden reverse came. For the heat of summer melted wagon-covers, caps and coats to sticky masses with an odor so offensive that they had to be buried. So the business collapsed, the various companies went into bankruptcy, and the very name of India-rubber came to be detested by producers and consumers alike. It was at this time that Charles Goodyear appeared upon the scene--unfortunately enough for himself, but fortunately for humanity--and determined to discover some method by which rubber could be made to withstand the extremes of heat and cold. From that time until the close of his life, he devoted himself wholly to this work, in the face of such hardships and discouragements as few other men have ever experienced. He began his experiments at once, and finally hit upon magnesia as a substance which, mixed with rubber, seemed to give it lasting properties; but a month later, the mixture began to ferment and became as hard and brittle as glass.