Vulcanite Dentures and the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company Royalty Fight

Draw your stool up beside your copper and keep your mouth shut while I talk. I give my patients that same advice and not one of them has ever taken it. I pull teeth as well as hammer copper, and my subject tonight is rubber teeth: pink plates, a Boston patent, and a pack of lawyers who would charge you a royalty on your dying breath if they could find out where you keep it.

Gold, Ivory, and Dead Men's Smiles

Before the war a rich man's false teeth sat on a gold plate. The dentist took a plaster cast of the gums and poured a metal die from it. Then he hammered a sheet of gold over that die with mallet and counter-die until it fit the roof of the mouth as a glove fits a hand. We call it swaging. I have swaged gold on my own anvil. The work wants patience and a good eye, and it costs more money than a Pittsfield mill hand sees in half a year. So the working man went toothless. He gummed his salt pork and whistled his esses like a teakettle.

The vain man of smaller means had ivory, carved from hippopotamus tusk or walrus. Ivory is a sponge, and within a few months it goes sour. One old drover from Barnstead had an ivory set so green and rank that when I laid it on my bench a fly landed on it, took one sniff, and fell over dead. I buried the fly. I did not bury the teeth, because he had not paid me yet.

The front teeth set into those plates very often came out of dead men's heads. After Waterloo in 1815, scavengers went over the field with pliers, and the dentists of Europe bought the teeth by the barrel. Fine ladies chewed their mutton with Waterloo teeth. I believe the same trade went on after some of our own battles. I have pulled more teeth than any man in Merrimack County, and I can tell you a live tooth fights you and crackles at the root. A dead one comes out with a soft little sigh, as if glad to be leaving.

Goodyear's Cure and the Pink Plate

Charles Goodyear, the Connecticut man, spent years trying to make India rubber behave. Raw rubber goes sticky as molasses in August and cracks like old pie crust in January. The story goes that he got rubber mixed with sulfur onto a hot stove and found it cured, firm and springy. He dropped rubber on a stove and invented an industry. I once dropped a jar on a stove and invented a new set of eyebrows. He patented the cure in 1844 and died in 1860 owing a mountain of debt. Remember that, because the men who came after him did not die broke.

His brother Nelson cooked the rubber with a great deal more sulfur, long and hot, until it went hard as horn and would take a file and a polish. That is vulcanite, also called ebonite, and Nelson patented it in 1851. Some bright fellow then packed soft rubber into a plaster mould of the gums, set porcelain teeth in it, and cooked it under steam. The result was a plate that fit snug, held its teeth fast, never went sour, and cost a fraction of gold.

The cooking is done in a vulcanizer, an iron or copper pot with its lid bolted down, water inside and fire under it. Mark this: it is a pressure vessel. Screw it down too tight or let the safety valve fail, and it bursts. In one Manchester office the lid went through the ceiling and landed in a lady's sewing basket in the room above. The pink of the gums, by the way, is largely vermilion, which is mercuric sulfide. An alchemist knows his cinnabar, and I find it a strange joke that we put the alchemist's red mercury into the mouths of the poor and call it progress. Still, it was progress. I have seen an old man bite into an apple for the first time in eleven years and sit weeping in my yard with the juice on his chin. And that is exactly when the lawyers showed up.

The Boston Patent and the Dentists' Revolt

In the fifties Dr. John A. Cummings, a Boston dentist, applied for a patent on the vulcanite denture plate itself. He was turned down more than once, but in 1864, with the country bleeding in the war, the patent was granted. The rights went to the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company, which carries the name of a man who never lived to see it. The company told every dentist in the Union to buy a license each year and pay a royalty on every set he made. Its treasurer is a Mr. Josiah Bacon of Boston. No man ever had a name that made my bear's mouth water faster. His agents walk into country offices and ask to see the vulcanizer, the way a revenue man asks to see the cellar.

The dentists have revolted, though not with muskets. They hold meetings, pass resolutions, and take up collections for court costs, swearing that rubber and vulcanizing were both known before and that no Boston man can own the inside of every American mouth. As for me, I have never in my life paid a man for the privilege of working with my own hands in my own shop over my own fire.

Mr. Pettengill Meets Barnaby

Last October a thin little man in a Boston coat came up the turnpike in a hired buggy. His name was Pettengill, and he had my name in his ledger. Some licensed tooth-carpenter in Concord had told him I was cooking plates without a license. I told him the iron pot in my back room was a bean cooker. He said there was a denture flask in it, and I said those were very special beans. He demanded back royalties since 1864 and a look at my books. I told him I keep my books where I keep my morals, which is nowhere a Boston man can find them.

He had set his sample case on the chopping block, which sits just inside the reach of Barnaby's chain. The case held a dozen display sets, pink gums and porcelain grinning on velvet. Barnaby cares nothing for patents, but he cares a great deal for anything that smells as if it has been in a human mouth. He came off the woodpile like a black avalanche and ate those plates one after another. Hard rubber pops like hickory nuts in a fire, and the porcelain teeth flew out the sides of his mouth like grapeshot. Mr. Pettengill tried to save the last set and lost his coat-tail and a good share of his trousers. He stood in my dooryard with a ledger held over the important parts, reciting the penalties for infringement in a very high voice.

I punched a copper cent on my anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and handed it to him as his royalty, and he took it. Three days later Barnaby passed the best set onto the woodpile nearly whole. I scrubbed it in lye and hung it over my shop door with a sign: Licensed by Barnaby.

Store Teeth in the Blue Ridge

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, came north to sit at my fire this season. In her mountains they call false teeth store teeth, or Sunday teeth, because they come out only for preaching, funerals, and courting. Aunt Tildy Ballard soaked hers overnight in a jar of apple brandy. Her husband Amos drained that jar before daylight, found the teeth grinning up at him from the bottom, and swore off liquor for nine days.

A traveling tooth-man named Rufus Shell had no license and wanted none. At the fall stir-off he would set his vulcanizer inside the great copper apple-butter kettle and cook his plates there. When a company man came sniffing at the sulfur stink, old Mrs. Akers told him, “why, that's just the Devil passing through the hollow, sir, he comes every fall about this time.” He left before supper. Miss Higgins also taught me two old words. Liquor strong enough to loosen a man's store teeth is plate-popper, and weak, stretched stuff is gum-wash. And Ezekiel Pruitt of Buffalo Mountain judged his persimmons by biting them. If a green one puckered his gums so tight that the plate dropped into his hand, the fruit stayed on the tree for another frost.

Cider Brandy and the Cuts

Consider this as a natural philosopher would. In the vulcanizer we cook sulfur into the rubber on purpose. In the still we fight sulfur at every step, and copper is our soldier. Nothing is medicine or poison by itself; it depends on where you put it. I say plainly that distilling spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law, and what follows is history and instruction only.

Press ripe apples, sweet and sharp mixed, into clean barrels in a cool cellar. The wild yeast will start the work, or you may pitch a cup of working cider from last year. Keep the cellar aired, because the gas from working barrels gathers low and can lay a man down. After two to four weeks the cider goes still and dry; siphon it off the lees. Charge the pot only partway, because cider foams when it boils, and a full pot will puke into your worm. A vulcanizer is screwed shut on purpose, but a still must never be sealed. Its path from pot to condenser must stay open, or you have made a bomb out of a kettle.

Bring the heat up slow. Throw out every drop of the foreshots. Set aside the heads, which smell of varnish, turpentine, and shoemaker's glue. This matters more with fruit than with corn, for the substance that sets jelly breaks down in the mash into wood alcohol, and that comes off early. A fruit brandy man who gets greedy with his early jars will go blind or go dead. Catch the hearts in small jars and nose each one, because the change creeps up on you and rings no bell. When the spirit smells of wet dog and boiled cabbage and feels oily on the fingers, you are in the tails. Never pour tails into the hearts to stretch the batch; that is how gum-wash is made. Scour your copper bright, because clean copper takes up the rotten-egg sulfur stink, and never patch a seam with lead solder. Keep the flame under the pot only, with water and sand by the door. My cousin Horace lit his pipe over fresh heads in 1858. He drew his eyebrows on with a burnt match every Sunday for thirty years afterward and always looked surprised in church.

Ashes, Shavings, and the Blue Flame

The blue flame test is hogwash. Wood alcohol burns with a pale flame that is near invisible in a bright room, so the spoon tells you only that you have set fire to good liquor in front of witnesses. Cletus “Rabbit” Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is potash, and in a hot keg it makes lye water. It may soften a sour wash, but it does nothing to the heads. Red oak is too porous for a liquor barrel, which is why coopers use white oak. Its shavings only steep out tannin and color, which is paint and not cleaning. A thump keg is a doubler that strengthens your spirit, but nothing you throw into it removes the poison. Only the distiller's judgment at the cuts does that.

Miss Higgins left me one more Virginia myth: put a store tooth in the jar and it turns black if the liquor is bad. In her words, “Mostly it just turns the tooth drunk.” So here is to Cummings, who got the patent; to the lawyers, who got the gold; and to the patients, who came out of it with teeth. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.