He also invented the perfect India rubber cloth by mixing fiber with the gum a discovery he considered rightly as secondary in importance only to vulcanization.
When he died in 1860 he had taken out sixty patents on rubber manufactures.

He had seen his invention applied to several hundred uses, giving employment to sixty thousand persons, producing annually eight million dollars' worth of merchandise--numbers which would form but a fraction of the rubber statistics of today.
Everybody, the whole civilized world round, uses rubber in one form or another.

And rubber makes a belt around the world in its natural as well as in its manufactured form.

The rubber-bearing zone winds north and south of the equator through both hemispheres.

In South America rubber is the latex of certain trees, in Africa of trees and vines.