AMERICA GETS RUBBER FEVER
When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both passed away on July 4, 1826—America’s fiftieth Independence Day—most Americans firmly believed their timed departures were a divine manifestation. Simultaneously leaving this world on America’s most celebrated day was nothing short of a sign from God, his seal of approval, a bold pronouncement of America’s grand destiny on the world’s stage.
Yet who would step up to steer America to its promised destiny? America needed a new generation of leaders.
It wouldn’t be Washington, the man revered as a God for crossing the Delaware in a surprise Christmas Eve attack on the British. It wouldn’t be any of the revolutionaries. They were now in their graves, and harrowing times were on the horizon. Only a decade later, America would find itself ravaged by financial speculation and panic. Mob rule reigned. South Carolina was making rumblings about seceding.
New leaders would come, but from the most unlikely of sources. Not from the ranks of lawyers, politicians or the privileged class. Rather, those who would transform America into an economic powerhouse and a world leader were its humble inventors.
Help came in the form of America’s great innovators, men like Goodyear, Morse, Colt, and McCormick, who forged ahead with their desire to invent, even in the most dire of circumstances. But they too would fight through their own Valley Forges. And as the economic crisis deepened, so did their struggles. In the mid 1830s, these names were so obscure, nobody could have guessed that it would be these inventors who would step forward and save America. But they did.
In their own way, each of these inventors somehow sensed his role in changing America. For Samuel Morse it started with art. Morse was set to place his name in the history books with his brush. His contribution would be to help America remember her past. Through his paintings, he would inspire the next generation to revere America’s founders and to do their part in making America great.
In 1825, just a year before the deaths of Jefferson and Adams, Morse could sense that his artistic talents would bring him fame. That year, Morse had been commissioned to paint the portrait of the very man who helped win the Revolutionary War: the Marquis de Lafayette, Washington’s most trusted general. Lafayette’s services were a gift from France, the result of years of delicate negotiations between Benjamin Franklin and the French court. With the infusion of French soldiers and French gold, Washington was able to fend off the British and Hessian troops.
Now Morse would be the one to create the last great painting of Lafayette. The commission came none too soon. The men of the revolution were quickly disappearing. But for Adams and Jefferson, who would die the following year, all the signers of the Declaration were now gone.
So Morse responded to the summons and traveled from New Haven to New York to meet with the venerable Marquis. The price of the commission was substantial: $1,000. On his way, Morse couldn’t help but think this was just a stepping stone. For his ultimate prize was to have his name, his artwork, adorning the Neolithic temple that was now being constructed in Washington. It was a dedication to the great men of the Revolution, those who had founded America, whose images would soon fill the walls of the Rotunda. For many, the Rotunda was intended to be America’s own Pantheon to the gods, where Washington would one day adorn the ceiling in a great apotheosis, where the revered man would be taken up to live with the gods. If Morse was born too late to be one of the founders, he would find a way to become immortal another way—through his paintings. He’d do it just as DaVinci did in The Last Supper, or Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, or Raphael with The School of Athens in the Vatican. Morse may well have believed that his art could preserve the spirit that created America, just as former artists inspired future generations with the spirit of the Renaissance.
But Morse would never realize his dream of a painting in the Rotunda, or even finish his portrait of Lafayette. Tragedy would call him elsewhere, to redirect his path to a more urgent need. Before Morse could finish Lafayette’s portrait, he received the tragic news of his wife’s impending death. By the time he reached home, she was already buried, leaving him with three children. Life would soon get worse for Morse. Only a few months later, he would lose both his father and mother and fall into a deep depression.
Yet Morse would find fame, and he would end up in the Rotunda. Not as the artist of one of the paintings, but as the subject. In fact, he appears there twice.
And Morse wouldn’t be the only one to have his image there. Except for Washington, the figures who would adorn the capital’s ceiling wouldn’t be America’s founders. Rather, it would be a new set of revolutionaries who would take America to her envisioned destiny. Not by laws or political will, but by technology. Instead of achieving independence from European powers by a prolonged war, this new generation would strengthen America by inventing. America would produce more men like Whitney whose cotton gin had given both farmers and merchants a taste of the wealth and self-sufficiency that came with innovation.
Although the Founding Fathers constituted some of the world’s greatest legal and political talent who came together to create the legal framework for America, their contributions alone did not guarantee America’s future success. The great innovators of the nineteenth century would step in and play an important role in ensuring America’s economic development.
And the sacrifices of these men are comparable to those made by the signers of the Declaration. For not only would they invent America out of its crisis, they would end Jefferson’s experiment and rewrite the laws vital to protecting this innovation. In a sense, it would be a new Bill of Rights, an expansion of the Constitutional mandate to promote the useful arts and sciences. The ensuing explosion of ideas, inventive genius, and technological economic development would prove to be the only way for America to assert herself as a leader of the free world.
But in 1825, Morse knew none of this. Life had dealt him a severe blow. To pull himself out of despair, Morse took a sabbatical to Europe, concentrating on his painting, studying the artwork in the Louvre, and meeting with James Fennimore Cooper in Italy. The journey had shades of Ben Franklin’s ventures a half century earlier, escaping to London, then to Paris for his own intellectual stimulation. Although the visit to Europe revived Morse, he constantly longed for his three children back in America. He was frustrated by the slowness of the mail. Morse couldn’t understand why it took months for a single letter to reach his children.
That would soon change. On Morse’s return home from Europe in 1832 on the Sully, one lively dinner conversation turned to the recent discovery of electromagnetism and how a French physicist had developed a system that used an electromagnet to move a needle to different letters. When Morse’s dinner companion, Charles Thomas Jackson, a scientist fascinated with electromagnetism, confirmed that electricity could travel down a wire, Morse had his idea for transmitting signals over long ranges.
Yet Morse still clung to the hope of painting his masterpiece in the Rotunda of the Capitol. After all, he was a painter, not a scientist. That was when John Quincy Adams did him, and the world, one giant favor. In 1834 the last four paintings in the set were put up for commission. Adams, who headed the House committee responsible for the selection, wanted to attract additional artists and extended the opportunity to foreign painters. Protests rolled in, including one from Morse’s friend, James Fennimore Cooper. The letter was published in the New York Evening Post and was attributed to Morse. Outraged, Adams yanked Morse from the list of potential candidates, and virtually ended his painting career. Morse decided to put all of his efforts into completing the telegraph.
Lacking funds to support himself, in 1835 Morse took an unpaid position teaching art at New York University, hoping to earn money from tutoring. Even with little income, Morse worked nights and weekends until his first telegraph machine showed promise.
Morse’s first receiver consisted of an old picture frame fastened to a table, with the wheels of an old wooden clock being used to move the marking paper forward. A wooden pendulum holding a pencil moved over the paper to make marks each time the circuit was broken. Morse showed this to one of his colleagues, Professor Leonard D. Gayle, who helped Morse with his first attempt at a long distance transmittal over 40 feet of wire. Even with limited funds, Morse managed to improve the distance to 1,700 feet, using wires strewn across campus. By October 1837, that distance was up to ten miles of wire wound around reels set up in Dr. Gale’s lecture room. Morse was convinced the design was good enough to file his patent application on the now famous electromagnetic telegraph. His first filing was known as a “caveat,” a mere place holder meant to protect his basic idea until he filed a full-blown application. Morse’s next challenge would be how to commercialize the telegraph.
And while Morse’s passion for painting ultimately led him to the telegraph, it would be Samuel Colt’s passion for sailing that would inspire him to invent the revolver. Colt’s original dream, beginning while a student at Amherst Academy, was to be a great explorer on the open seas. That, he believed, was what would make his name immortal. So in 1831, he hired himself out to the Corvo. While there on the open seas, Colt, like Morse, experienced his flash of genius. Mesmerized by the locking action of the ship’s wheel, Colt realized that this same mechanism could be used in a firearm. Colt conjectured that lifting the gun’s hammer could rotate the breech until one of its chambers (that held the bullet) came in line with the barrel. While still on this voyage, Colt carved his first prototype out of wood.
When Colt returned to land, he knew he had a good idea. But he had no idea how to make a revolver commercially, let alone market it. There was also the question as to whether unscrupulous opportunists would copy it—just as they did with Whitney’s cotton gin. Most important, Colt needed money to build a line of firearms. Even though America had plenty of investors looking to invest, they were reluctant to invest in Colt’s idea. Colt didn’t have a patent, and the venture capitalists of the day were unwilling to take a risk on Colt.
So how does a person raise money in the 1830s? In Colt’s case, by drawing further on his creativity. In one of the history’s stranger stories, Colt became an entertainer, taking the stage name of Dr. Coult and embarking on a laughing gas tour of North America, where he educated the public on the virtues of inhaling nitrous oxide. The money he raised he hoped to use to make more firearms.
Colt left on his fundraising tour on March 30, 1832. For the next three years he took his show from the Carolinas all the way to Nova Scotia, where he charged fifty cents admission while typically shelling out a $5 rental fee plus costs for lighting. Overall, Colt raised close to $1,300, which he paid gunsmiths to develop an assortment of prototypes.
The entire venture was rather juvenile, a trait Colt never seemed to outgrow. To capture his listeners’ attention, Colt developed a pat script, explaining the virtues of the “exhilarating gas.” To some, he explained, it made them ludicrous, encouraging them to leap and run. For others, the effect was to put them in involuntary fits of laughter and fill them with “pleashourable sensations.”
But there were dangers as well, Colt warned his audience (or perhaps these were mere theatrics), and they needed to dispose of their knives and weapons before inhaling to guard against an accident. With all the disclaimers out in the open air, Colt himself inhaled and the show began.
Humiliating or not, the show enabled Colt to commission ten pistols, seven rifles, and one shotgun from a number of gunmakers. By August 1835 Colt had enough prototypes to consider his next step—a visit to the patent office.
While Morse struggled with an invention to bring the world together through a series of dots and dashes and Colt experimented with one to strengthen the American army, Cyrus McCormick was stewing over how to harvest wheat using a machine. Yet McCormick would take a different path than both Morse and Colt. McCormick, inheriting his father’s passion for machinery, had for decades been contemplating the problem of efficiently harvesting grain.
Before McCormick came on the scene, grain had been harvested the same way for millennia. The stalks were hand cut with sharp scythes. Following the reapers were gatherers, who would gather the cut grain and bundle them into sheathes, where the grain was allowed to dry. The main problem with using scythes was their inefficiency. On average, a man could cut less than three acres of grain a day. With America’s exponentially growing population, the number of workers required to produce America’s food would become impractical. In 1830, three-fourths of America’s work force worked in agriculture. If that trend continued, by 1870 the number of agricultural workers would be nearly 29 million. Much of the required labor was attributable to harvesting crops by hand. And perhaps the most time consuming of all, was the harvesting of grain.
In 1831, McCormick was determined to find a solution to this problem, and he did so by taking up his father’s failed twenty-year project to construct a mechanical reaper. The clanking machinery on his father’s 532-acre farm near Lexington, Virginia, with its own grist-mill and distillery, routinely landed Whitney’s father the derision of his neighbors. But where his father failed, McCormick was determined to succeed. Using every spare minute, McCormick began his tinkering. He would make his father’s harvester cut grain.
The 1831 prototype cut a mere six acres of oats—sort of. Much of the grain was trampled to the ground. What McCormick had been able to figure out was a way to bring the grains to his reciprocating blades so that they could be cut. Eventually, McCormick came up with the idea of using a reel to gather the stalks, then deliver them to the blades. He also used a divider to isolate the stalks that were to be cut. As the horses pulled the reaper across the grain field, the cut stalks fell backward onto a platform where a man stood and gathered it into sheaves.
After two more years of hard work, McCormick was cutting ten to twelve acres a day. Still, McCormick refused to file his patent application. He was a perfectionist, and the reaper wasn’t performing up to his satisfaction.
McCormick’s delay let the competition slip in. In the spring of 1834 McCormick learned of an ex-seaman, Obed Hussey, who had been marketing his own reaper for almost a year. Hussey, born in Nantucket, was raised to be a whaler. Like Colt who also loved the sea, Hussey was a tinkerer, loving to sort through mechanical problems. Hussey’s venture in the reaper business came about because of a dare. He was working on a machine to mold candles when a friend challenged him to invent a machine to reap grain because that would make him a fortune. Immediately, Hussey gave up on candle making and a year later had his reaper.
Outraged at this slight, McCormick rushed to the patent office and filed his own application on June 21, 1834, then warned Hussey that he had built a working reaper previous to 1833. The two would end up in a decade-long feud. Still, McCormick refused to take his reaper to market for another five years—until he was certain it was worthy of selling. Then, he would guarantee farmers could cut at a rate of 1.5 acres per hour, a fivefold increase over the 3 acres per day now done by hand.
Although in the early 1830s the telegraph, revolver, and reaper were still essentially unknown to the world, rubber was not. Rumors of this new “super material” shot through the financial markets, sending inventors scurrying for a chance to catch the wave. Almost overnight, America had caught rubber fever.
Rubber was like nothing America—or anyone else in the world—had ever experienced. Boots that could keep your feet dry, even in rushing water? A waterproof rain jacket? It was unheard of. Yet at the end of the 1820s, it all seemed within the realm of possibility.
Although latex, the sticky white fluid from which rubber is made, had been known for centuries, the ability to turn it into rubber was a new phenomenon. Americans had experienced “sticky fingers” when picking dandelions, but the significance of latex didn’t occur to anyone until the “rubber tree” from northern Brazil came to the world’s attention. It was this latex that could most easily be turned into rubber. And Brazil had enough trees to supply any world demand. Make a few incisions in the bark, put a cup at the base of the tree, and wait for the milky white substance to drizzle away.
Latex became popular in Europe in the 1700s when it was spread over the fabric to produce a waterproof cloth. The latex could be turned into a paint if it and pigments were combined with turpentine. But it wasn’t until the 1820s that Brazilians began making rubber shoes and importing them to America. New England imported eight tons of shoes in 1826. Four years later that number jumped to 161 tons.
And that’s when the craze began. Ordinary Americans starting investing in start-up rubber companies with a reckless abandon. No matter that they knew nothing about the material itself—they unwisely thought they could make immense profits when every foot in America cried out for a rubber boot.
Rubber companies came out of the woodwork, and their bank accounts were bursting with invested money. The numbers were staggering, just like those of the dot-com start-ups that would raise millions overnight. Take the Roxbury India Rubber Company. In 1833, its founder—a leather worker who wanted a way to make leather waterproof—raised $30,000 to start the company. The amount of capital raised by the company ballooned to $240,000 by 1836. In today’s dollars, that figure would be in the tens of millions. Most of the rubber companies sprang up in Massachusetts, although Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey had their fair share.
And that provided an opportunity to Charles Goodyear. Goodyear, of slim build, clean shaven, and with coal black hair, found comfort in experimenting with his rubber samples, hoping to find a way to make them immune to temperature changes. If he found any spare time, that was spent with his large family. Like McCormick, Goodyear was also raised on the family farm—on the Naugatuck River in Connecticut. Also like McCormick, Goodyear’s father was a tinkerer—inventing scythes, clocks, pearl buttons, lamps, and a spring steel fork for lifting hay. At age twenty-five Goodyear took his wife Clarissa to Philadelphia to open a hardware store. But Goodyear was no business man. After only a few years, his hardware business failed. Goodyear used this as an opportunity to proudly tell Clarissa that he was born to be an inventor. He was going to fix the “rubber problem.” And she believed him—she always believed in him.
Goodyear’s spark of interest in rubber came in the fateful year 1834 when he invented a new valve for a rubber life preserver, then tried to market the idea, only to discover—along with everybody else—that rubber in its current form was useless. When the summer temperatures elevated in 1834, the shoes and hats melted. Left out in the sun, the goods turned into a gooey, stinking mess, just like caramel or taffy, but with a smell worse than manure. Customers returned their pungent shoes en masse, demanding full refunds. Following the hot summer months of 1834, $20,000 worth of claims were posted with Roxbury India Company alone. Almost overnight, the rubber companies disappeared—and their investors’ money evaporated. The capital losses for Roxbury were a whopping $400,000.
The technology failure of rubber made it all the way to the Great Basin. It all happened with a rubber boat made by Horace Day—the man who would haunt Goodyear for decades. When the Salt Lake Valley was nothing but an uninhabited desert, sparsely covered with sagebrush, John C. Freemont watched in horror as Day’s rubber boat—hauled all the way from Washington D.C.—began to fall apart in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. Freemont, exploring the West, had also been fooled into thinking that rubber was a miracle material that could be used for anything, including boats. It was nearly a miracle that his men were barely able to row the disintegrating vessel to shore. It was more than a decade longer before Brigham Young would lead his followers to the valley. And it would take that long before Goodyear had the solution.
Still, Goodyear was obsessed with finding a stable, non-melting rubber. With hundreds of thousands of pounds of useless rubber lying around, it was easy for Goodyear to take up his experiments. But with no income, Goodyear was soon thrown into debtor’s prison. It was a place he would come to know well. But even in jail, Goodyear continued his quest by convincing Clarissa to bring him a block of rubber and a rolling pin so he could continue with his experiments.
For the Goodyears this was normal life. They bounced from house to house, from city to city, getting evicted and watching their belongings auctioned off by the local sheriff. The places their living would take them were horrific, usually in slums, bordered by whorehouses. Even in those circumstances, the neighbors complained about the stench and noise emanating from the Goodyear residence. A peek inside revealed a rat’s nest of rubber samples, scattered pots and pans, all infused with a noxious, vile odor.
If 1834 was bad for investors, it paled in comparison with what would happen in 1837 when a nationwide panic tore through the capital markets. Half the nation’s banks failed, and many stocks became worthless. Andrew Jackson, the believer in an agrarian America, was out of the White House, replaced by Van Buren. Political unrest was rampant as those affected by the financial collapsed looked for someone to blame. Many questioned whether this was the end of the Great Experiment. America was on the verge of collapse.
At this same moment, America’s innovators were on the brink of making their technological breakthroughs. They needed help. They needed capital, they needed encouragement, and they needed assurances that their ideas would not be stolen. If their ideas were not protected, if they were treated like Whitney, the movement would fizzle. If these men all had one thing in common, it was that they were going to fight to protect their ideas—even if it took every dime of their fortunes.
Fortunately, help was on its way. And it all started with Colt’s visit to the patent office.