The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-10-07


 ter. Other dirigibles when not inflated can be squeezed Into a small compass and can easily be shipped to any point where they are needed. And then there are the kite balloons and captive observation bal looms which are in use among the armies abroad and which we shall have to sup ply for our force in the field. Some of these balloons must De able to fly 35 miles an hour and that at height of ooVo feet. They are to be built for the navy, They are testing these balloons somewhere in Ohio and they have a school there for teaching men to flv them. This school is presided over by Rainh H. Upson, who will be remem- bered as having won the last James Gordon Bennett balloon trophy race which was held at Paris shortly before the war began. Some of the largest of these dirigible balloons cost as much as s50,000 each.
 It would take a column of this news paper to print even the names of tho different kinds of rubber goods that are now being made for the army. In one Of the large establishments here I saw hum dreds of men and women making boots and shoes for the men in the trenches. and in another place they were making rubber slickers and ponchos. The trenches are often full of water and hip boots are part of the soldiers equipment. Some of the men wear rubber stockings. between woolen and cotton ones and some of the officers have rubber sheets upon which they sleep to keep out of the wet. Every man we send to Europe will have to have a rubber coat or slicker and the rubber shoes and boots required will be numbered by millions In one of the factories here I saw them vulcaniz- ing hundreds of pairs of boots at one time. The boots were on steel frames which were about two feet taller than the workmen who pushed them into the great iron ovens or retorts, lined with Iron pipes, where this was accomplished A touch of a button dropped the steel door of the oven. when the steam was turned on and the vulcanization began.
 But before I go farther, let me tell you something as to how the crude rubber is turned into the manufactured rubber of commerce. The first rubber manufacturers were in the shape of balls, which Columbus found used by the Indians on the West Indies Islands shortly after he discovered America A little later Cortez was taught by the Aztecs In Mexico to spread it over the coats of his soldiers to keep out the rain, and about 26 years before our Declaration of Independence a French man brought some of the juice of the rubber tree from Ecuador to Europe in the shape of rude bottles. The first
 manufacture of rubber by civilized man was by pr. Joseph Priestley, an English scientist, who came to the United States While George Washington was President Dr. Priestley made the first rubber erasers. They were cubes much smaller than the kind we now buy for a nickel. They were half an inch long and sold for 75 cents
 The first waterproof cloth was made by an Englishman in 1797, about the tune that John Adams was inaugurated President of the United States, but it would not stand the heat and it was not until the presidency of John Quincy Adams that Charles Macintosh, a Scotchman, discovered how to dissolve rubber in naptha, and made liquid which, spread upon cloth, caused it to shed water That was the birth of the slicker and the rubber coats of all kinds that our men will wear in the field.
 The greatest of all rubber inventions, however was made by an American This was Charles Goodyear, who dis II. Goodyear was a Connecticut Yankee, who began life as a hardware man. He became interested in the study of rub Der, and when he saw some shoes made or the pure gum, which had been inn ported from Brazil he conceived the idea of making something of the kind for the trade. He used pure gum, which was then cheap, but the shoes softened during the summer and gave out a bad odor. Goodyear tried to harden the rub Der by treating its surface with nitric acid, and he was able to improve it thereby. He then tried mixing it with sulphur and rubber on his kitchen stove, some of the gum fell out upon a hot iron. Instead of melting, the stuff hard ened like leather, and he discovered that great heat would make rubber hard He took the rubber outside and nailed it to the wall of the house to see whether it would stand the cold. There was a frost that night, but the next morning the piece of rubber was as elastic as ever, and 1t had none of the brittleness of the cold rubber he had previously made. He then went on until he learned just how the gum should be treated and the amount of heat needed for vulcaniza- tion. He then took out his first patent in 1S44, and upon that patent has grown the great rubber industry of today. Va rious improvements have been added to make vulcanized rubber soft, and we have it in various shapes.
 I wish I could take you over one of these big rubber factories and show YOU the many processes through which the crude rubber goes before it comes out in rubber gloves, automobile tires diving suits and in the thousand other shapes in which 1t is used by the consumer The establishments are enormous. They have hundreds of acres of floor space and there are three each of which employs in the neighborhood of 15,O00 men and wom- en. I went through one of the largest, touching only the high spots. The time spent was several hours and my trip was Sabbath days journey. or as far as from Bethlehem to Jerusalem In one room, covering an acre, I saw hundreds of spindles moving around like those of a great cotton mill. They were making n- sulated wire for teiephonic and tele- graphic use and for various kinds of elec- trical machines. In other places they were making rubber gloves to be used by electricians while handling live wires, and in others insuators for wireless out fits, and rubber packing for the peri scopes Of the Sllbrn rines The very tor-