At this step he did not hesitate. The occasion, and the certainty of success, warranted the measure which, in other circumstances, would have been sacrilege." His itinerary during those years is eloquent. Wherever there was a man, who had either a grain of faith in rubber or a little charity for a frail and penniless monomaniac, thither Goodyear made his way. The goal might be an attic room or shed to live in rent free, or a few dollars for a barrel of flour for the family and a barrel of rubber for himself, or permission to use a factory's ovens after hours and to hang his rubber over the steam valves while work went on. From Woburn in 1839, the year of his great discovery, he went to Lynn, from Lynn back to the deserted factory at Roxbury. Again to Woburn, to Boston, to Northampton, to Springfield, to Naugatuck; in five years as many removes. When he lacked boat or railway fare, and he generally did, he walked through winds and rains and drifting snow, begging shelter at some cottage or farm where a window lamp gleamed kindly. Goodyear took out his patent in 1844. The process he invented has been changed little, if at all, from that day to this. He also invented the perfect India rubber cloth by mixing fiber with the gum a discovery he considered rightly as secondary in importance only to vulcanization. When he died in 1860 he had taken out sixty patents on rubber manufactures. He had seen his invention applied to several hundred uses, giving employment to sixty thousand persons, producing annually eight million dollars' worth of merchandise--numbers which would form but a fraction of the rubber statistics of today. Everybody, the whole civilized world round, uses rubber in one form or another. And rubber makes a belt around the world in its natural as well as in its manufactured form. The rubber-bearing zone winds north and south of the equator through both hemispheres. In South America rubber is the latex of certain trees, in Africa of trees and vines. The best "wild" rubber still comes from Para in Brazil. It is gathered and prepared for shipment there today by the same methods the natives used four hundred years ago. The natives in their canoes follow the watercourses into the jungles. They cut V-shaped or spiral incisions in the trunks of the trees that grow sheer to sixty feet before spreading their shade. At the base of the incisions they affix small clay cups, like swallows' nests. Over the route they return later with large gourds in which they collect the fluid from the clay cups. The filled gourds they carry to their village of grass huts and there they build their smoky fires of oily palm nuts. Dipping paddles into the fluid gum they turn and harden it, a coating at a time, in the smoke. The rubber "biscuit" is cut from the paddle with a wet knife when the desired thickness has been attained.