While a boy on his father's farm, he one day picked up a scale of rubber peeled from a bottle, and conceived the notion that this substance could be turned into a most useful material if it were made uniformly thin and prepared in such way as to prevent its melting and sticking together in a solid mass. When he was first imprisoned for debt, the use of rubber was attracting general attention. He became strongly interested in finding a way for making the article more useful. The chief difficulty in treating rubber lay in its susceptibility to extremes of temperature; it melted in summer and became stiffened in winter. Strenuous effort had been expended in attempting to overcome this difficulty, but without success. Goodyear dedicated his energies to a solution of the problem. His experiments were conducted in Philadelphia, in New York, and in Massachusetts towns. During this period he and his family lived literally from hand to mouth, and more than once subsisted upon what was virtually the charity of friends. Sometimes it was necessary to sell the children's books and articles of household furniture to drive the wolf of hunger from the door. Much of his experimentation was carried on in prison, with no encouragement from any source to cheer him on. At times his hopes arose as victory seemed near; they soon fell, as what he had mistaken for triumph proved to be defeat. He became the butt of those who did not share his own constant faith in the ultimate success of his labors. He was calm in defeat, patient in ridicule, and always bore himself with magnificent fortitude. [Illustration: CHARLES GOODYEAR] In the early months of 1839 Goodyear could shout with the old Syracusan mathematician, "Eureka!"--"I have found it!" He had discovered that rubber coated with sulphur and then heated to a high degree of heat is rendered uniformly elastic in all temperatures. He had solved the problem, but it was two long years before he could convince any one of the fact. William Rider, of New York, finally furnished capital for carrying on the business of manufacturing rubber goods according to the new process. The firm was successful and Goodyear had soon paid off thirty-five thousand dollars of indebtedness owed to creditors of his old business that had failed ten or fifteen years before.