Trials of an Inventor; Life and Discoveries of Charles Goodyear (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IH. EARLY LIFE. Mr. Amasa Goodyear, while residing in New Haven, was engaged in commercial business. He owned the neck of land which is well known in the city now as " Oyster Point," and here was the pleasant homestead where Charles passed his early boyhood. Merchants of New Haven and Hartford, at this time, carried on quite an extensive trade with the West Indies, and it was in this business that Mr. Goodyear was engaged. But while Charles was still young, his father bought an interest in a patent for the manufacture of buttons, and removed to Naugatuck, a village situated upon a small river of the same name, about eighteen miles from New Haven, in order to avail himself of the water-power obtained here for carrying onhis new business. Tn 1807 he commenced the manufacture of the first pearl buttons made in America; and in the war of 1812 he supplied the government with metal buttons. The senior Mr. Goodyear was a very inge nious man. He made several valuable improvements, particularly in the manufacturing of agricultural implements, for which he held patents. One proved to be very valuable. Before his day, hay and manure forks were made by blacksmiths out of wrought iron; but he constructed and obtained a patent for the beautiful strong and elastic steel fork, which long bore the name of father and son, and brought quite a fortune to them. It is a curious fact, showing the reluctance with which plain people admit of any change, that when these forks were first offered, no one would buy them, and the inventor had some difficulty in bestowing them gratuitously upon the farmers, and securing their promise to give them a fairtrial and report the result. When their excellence became known, no others in the market could be so readily sold. The business included the man...