rubber that clogs it.]

[Illustration: IN MAKING GARDEN HOSE THE RUBBER IS FORMED INTO A TUBE
BY THE MACHINE ON THE RIGHT AND COILED ON THE TABLE TO THE LEFT]

The Peruvian natives had used caoutchouc for water-proof clothing,
shoes, bottles and syringes, but Europe was slow to take it up, for the
stuff was too sticky and smelled too bad in hot weather to become
fashionable in fastidious circles. In 1825 Mackintosh made his name
immortal by putting a layer of rubber between two cloths.

A German chemist, Ludersdorf, discovered in 1832 that the gum could be
hardened by treating it with sulfur dissolved in turpentine. But it was
left to a Yankee inventor, Charles Goodyear, of Connecticut, to work out
a practical solution of the problem. A friend of his, Hayward, told him
that it had been revealed to him in a dream that sulfur would harden
rubber, but unfortunately the angel or defunct chemist who inspired the
vision failed to reveal the details of the process. So Hayward sold out
his dream to Goodyear, who spent all his own money and all he could
borrow from his friends trying to convert it into a reality. He worked
for ten years on the problem before the "lucky accident" came to him.
One day in 1839 he happened to drop on the hot stove of the kitchen that
he used as a laboratory a mixture of caoutchouc and sulfur. To his
surprise he saw the two substances fuse together into something new.
Instead of the soft, tacky gum and the yellow, brittle brimstone he had
the tough, stable, elastic solid that has done so much since to make our
footing and wheeling safe, swift and noiseless. The gumshoes or galoshes
that he was then enabled to make still go by the name of "rubbers" in
this country, although we do not use them for pencil erasers.