This disovery is often cited as one of history's most-celebrated "accidents." Goodyear stoutly denied that. Like Newton's falling apple, he maintained, the hot stove incident held meaning only for the man "whose mind was prepared to draw an inference." That meant, he added simply, the one who had "applied himself most perseveringly to the subject."

The winter after Goodyear's discovery was the blackest of his life. Dyspeptic and gout-racked, his health broken, he hobbled about his experiments on crutches. He knew now that heat and sulphur miraculously changed rubber. But how much heat, for how long? With endless patience he roasted bits of rubber in hot sand, toasted them like marshmallows, steamed them over the teakettle, pressed them between hot irons. When his long-suffering wife took her bread from the oven he thrust in chunks of evil-smelling gum.

At night he lay awake, afraid that he would die and the secret die with him. He pawned his watch and the household furniture. When even the dinnerware was gone, he made rubber dishes to eat from. Then the food was gone too.

That spring he went to Boston to look up friends, found none, was jailed for nonpayment of a $5 hotel bill, and came home to find his infant son dead. Unable to pay for a funeral, Goodyear hauled the little coffin to the graveyard in a borrowed wagon. Of the 12 Goodyear children, six died in infancy.

But Goodyear was concinved, almost religiously, that he was rubber's chosen prophet -- "an instrument in the hands of his Maker." For strength he read the Book of Job.

At last he found that steam under pressure, applied for four to six hours at around 270 degrees Farenheit, gave him the most uniform results. He wrote his wealthy New York brother-in-law -- who had once lectured him about his parental obligations -- of his discovery. This time the brother-in-law, a textile manufacturer, was interested, for Charles told him that interwoven rubber threads would produce the fashionable puckered effect then much favored in men's shirts. Two "shirred goods" factories were rushed into production and, on the ruffled shirtfronts of dandies, rubber rode to world-wide success.

As soon as he could, Goodyear disposed of the manufacturing interests which might have mde him a millionaire and went back to his experiments. He wanted to make everything of rubber: banknotes, musical instruments, flags, jewlery, ship sails, even ships themselves. he had his portrait painted in rubber, his calling cards engraved on it, his autobiography printed and bound on it. He wore rubber hats, vests, ties.

Goodyear saw rubber as what we know it is today: the first and most versatile of the modern "plastics." He perceived it as a "vegetable leather" that defied the elements, an "elasic metal," a wood substiture that could be shaped in molds.

Some of his ideas still turn up as "new" uses for rubber. Many food packagers, for example, now wrap their products in Pliofilm, a rubber-derived plastic; Goodyear suggests the same application in 1850. Rubber paint, car springs, ferryboat bumpers, wheelbarrow tires, inflatable life rafts, and "frogmen" suits are other recent innovations he described a century ago.

Goodyear's business deals, licensing manufacture under his scores of patents, were rediculously bad. Shirred-goods rights, for instance, went for a royalty of three cents a yard; the licensees made $3.00 a yard.

Against "patent pirates" Goodyear was forced to prosecute 32 infringement cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In one famous 1852 case, his advocate was no less a personage than Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Goodyear paid Webser $15,000 for temporarily doffing the robes of Cabinet office -- the largest fee ever paid an American lawyer to that time. In a two-day speech Webster won a permanent injunction against further patent infringements. It made headlines, but it didn't stop the piracy.

Goodyer was slow in filing foreign patent applications. But he had sent samples of his heat-and-sulphur-treated gum to british rubber companies without revealing details. One sample was seen by famed English rubber pioneer Thomas Hancock, who had been trying for 20 years to make weatherroof rubber. Hancock noted a yellowish sulphur "bloom" on the Goodyear sample's surface. With that clue, he reinvented vulcanized rubber in 1843, four years after Goodyear. By the time Goodyear applied for an English patent he found that Hancock had filed a few weeks earlier.

Offered at a half-share of the Hancock patent to drop his suit, Goodyear foolishly declined -- and lost. A friend of Hancock named the contested process "vulcanization," afer Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

At the London and Paris world's fairs of the 1850's Goodyear installed great pavilions built entirely of rubber, floor to roof. When his French patent was cancelled on a technicality and his French royalties stopped before he could pay his bills, he was seized by gendarmes and hustled off to a 16-day stay at his familiar "hotel" (as he called it) -- debtors' prison. There he received the cross of the Legion of Honor, bestowed by Emperor Napolean III.

When he died, in 1860, he was $200,000 in debt. Eventually, however, accumulated royalties made his family comfortable. His son, Charles, Jr., inhereted someting more precious -- inventive talent -- and later built a small fortune on shoemaking machinery.

Neither Goodyear nor his family was ever connected with the company named in his honor, today's billion-dollar (1958 figures) Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the world's largest rubber business. Goodyear's only direct descendant among modern companies is United States Rubber, which years ago absorbed a small company he once served as director.

Today there is a cultivated rubber tree for every two human beings on earth. Three million tree "milkers" harvest the crop. The United States alone imports almost half of it, and synthesizes as much or more from petroleum. Nearly 300,000 Americans earn their livelihoods in rubber manufacturing, thes year will prduce six billion dollars' worth of products.

The whole huge apparatus owes its existence to the invincible little fanatic who might have died a bitter man, but didn't.

"Life," he wrote, "should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents. I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps."