✅ SOLVED Button- Please help identify!

[Oradden]

Massachusetts-

So a friend and I were digging bottles at a 1840's bottle dump. This dump is in a very large foundation that is longer rather than total square footage. My friend also metal detects and usually likes to find buttons and coins...

Friend looks down and finds a very small dark button. This button is just about smaller than a dime and almost black. No cleaning has been done besides proper removal of dirt and sediment. The button used to have a loop on the back but is now broken off.

The front of the button, facing away from the clothing has a design that looks almost like a curving serpent. On the back is the word "GOOD" also there is the letter "P"









Need help in identifying this button. Please and thank you!

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

DR.ÖTEK Metal Detector, Waterproof Gold Detector, Pinpoint & Terrain Modes, Professional Metal Detector - Grab it through Amazon!

[kuger]

Its a rubber "GOODYEAR" button


Trying to find a match for the face.Does the back look like this?
Ridgeway Civil War Archive Buttons from Federal Sharpshooters


Well not finding a match,but here is a little more info
http://www.buttoncrs.com/patentsusa.html

 

[Oradden]

Is that a serious reply?

 

[Oradden]

I take that back. Just sounded odd. Didn't mean to come off in any way besides inquiry. Thank you

 

[kuger]

...dead serious....pretty cool huh?

 

[Oradden]

Would never have guessed. That's why I appreciate the team on treasurenet everyone is ready to help. Even if I can't wrap my head around a rubber button that old. Made by Goodyear.

 

[Oradden]

Who wore these buttons? And so many designs. Looks as if though they were custom made.

 

[kuger]

They were made for the civilian trade originally.....so anybody

 

[CC Hunter]

These 19th Century hard rubber buttons, (and some continuing even into the early 20th Century), carrying the Goodyear name, were in fact principally manufactured by other companies, rather than an actual company under the name Goodyear.

The United States Patent Office issued patent number 3633, on June 15, 1844, to Charles Goodyear, for the process that he had developed to vulcanize rubber (basically stabilizing the sticky gooey tree sap into a useable material for manufacturing products).

On the back of the button at the beginning of this thread, is most likely shown in raised letters: GOODYEAR'S P=T * 1851 *

Goodyear; is for Charles Goodyear
P=T; is for the U.S. Patent
1851; is for the patent issued on May 6, 1851

The company name which may also be shown on these buttons, will likely be Novelty Rubber Company, (or in abbreviated form N.R. Co.), or possibly India Rubber Comb Company (or I.R.C. Co.) , or other lesser companies as listed in the following descriptions.


http://www.vintagebuttons.net/rubber.html


Goodyear Hard Rubber Buttons


Goodyear Hard Rubber Buttons 3


http://www.vintagebuttons.net/rubber4.html



In 1851, at the famed Crystal Place, International Exhibition, in London, the many various products made with Goodyear's rubber, caught the eyes and attention of the world.


Following is an excerpt from:

The Goodyear Story: An Inventor's Obsession and the Struggle for A Rubber Monopoly

"One of the most celebrated American exhibitors—notorious was the word his competitors would have used—bent on outdoing the English was a former Philadelphia hardware store owner named Charles Goodyear. He epitomized the spirit of the upstart American technologists, but was also, as some of his American colleagues saw, "a different breed." Little more than five feet tall, he had a complexion the color of buckskin and slightly outturned ears. Behind his square jaw a thin line of whiskers fringed his neck. That he intended to stand apart from his countrymen could be seen in the fact that he installed his main exhibit of his vulcanized rubber on the second level of the Northeast Gallery, well away from them. It was immediately noticeable as "costly in character, but very pure in taste," said one writer, an elaborate display that would draw interest to that part of the hall. Clearly Charles Goodyear was using his presence at the Great Exhibition to establish himself once and for all as one of the century's leading "men of progress," an identity he had been chasing much of his life.
Many of the other Americans and a few of the English "technologists" displaying their innovations in the Crystal Palace were aware of Goodyear and regarded his story with awe and censure. The precocious first child of a hardworking Connecticut farmer-blacksmith and button maker, Goodyear was groomed for a career in business almost from birth. At seventeen he entered a hardware store apprenticeship and eventually, in partnership with his father and brother, set up a shop in Philadelphia that seemed to flourish. Then suddenly the business plunged into financial ruin and his family returned to the blacksmith's trade, but with Goodyear burdened by a huge debt.

When Charles Goodyear was just a boy, there were few signs in the United States of the manufacturing might that was developing in England. Industry consisted largely of water-powered mills and crafts pursued in barns and sheds. Americans were dependent on Europe for most of their manufactured goods. But some heard distant echoes as the revolutionary improvements in steam engines and steam-powered boats and trains began to transform the country. American mechanics became obsessed with "ingenuity" as much as the "rugged individualism" that was also part of the emerging national identity. The virtue of industriousness, technology and prosperity became for many Americans almost "providentially linked," in the words of historian Gordon Wood. Goodyear made a conscious decision to become a full-time inventor at a time when the New England tinkerer still had an exalted place in the American imagination.

As he searched for the technological handhold that would give him a place in the world of invention, Goodyear discovered what he quickly convinced himself could be a miracle substance. It was rubber, and he believed that if he could unlock its potential it would change his fortunes and change the world as well. With no background in the developing science of chemistry, he was poorly prepared for the task. Although Goodyear understood that carbon in coal united with iron to become steel, he knew nothing of molecular science. He never fully understood that what he eventually accomplished by adding chemicals and heat to the pasty raw rubber—the creation of a thermoset material through the cross-linking of rubber's long, chainlike molecules—was one of the auspicious early milestones of the new age of synthetics. Over the next century technologists would make the journey from manipulating natural chain molecules called polymers to custom-designing synthetic ones, including some that serve as "scaffolds" inside the human body on which doctors can build artificial tissue. All Charles Goodyear knew was that he had a versatile miracle material that he at first called Heated Metallic Gum Composition and another time lightheartedly described as the Mighty Elastic Substance. Using his process, boot- and shoe-makers set a new standard for quality that an English paper proclaimed would "do away with the risk of corns and bunions, the cure of which has sprung into an actual profession." Rubber tents and capes kept thousands of Civil War soldiers dry. Still another product line, made quietly but prolifically, consisted of condoms and diaphragms.

In the 1830s and 40s, as he struggled to find the way to change rubber, Goodyear became obsessed with his miracle substance. He dressed in rubber and extolled its virtues to anyone who would listen. He had the mentality of the wildcatters who would soon populate the Pennsylvania oil fields. His spendthrift borrowing and spending and his unwillingness to return to safer means of earning a living exposed his family to terrible hardship and set events in motion that cost some of them their lives. To justify his family's suffering, he rationalized his economic plight—his "embarrassments," as people of the time called such misfortune—as a test of his Christian faith. Yet in his suffering and perseverance, his compulsive pursuit of his dream, he made himself a living embodiment of the age of invention. The Goodyear story, told and retold, held tremendous appeal for Americans who feared his brush with debtor's prison but admired his self-made success. The story inspired inventor Gail Borden, an American who was also at the Great Exhibition displaying his dried-meat biscuit. "I should have given up in despair if I had not read a sketch of your father's life," he told one of Goodyear's sons.

Goodyear's obsession seemed justified by the Great Exhibition. In Horace Greeley's words, "India Rubber was everywhere" in the Crystal Palace, with perhaps ten English, French and American companies showing their wares. The Macintosh exhibit held special significance for Goodyear and set up a drama of competition within the show. Well known for its water-repellent coats, or "Macks," the company had dominated English rubber making for twenty years thanks to partner Thomas Hancock's secret rubber-grinding machine. When Goodyear was still struggling to feed his family, he sent samples of his heated gum to Macintosh & Co., hoping it would pay to use it. Instead, Hancock made Goodyear the victim of a transatlantic intellectual property theft and claimed credit for the innovation. But if Goodyear looked like a victim in this situation, he looked like the victimizer almost at the same time. Another rival with an exhibit in London, Massachusetts-born Horace Day, sought to discredit the inventor in his own country. Day was challenging the validity of Goodyear's U.S. rubber patent and considered him the original "confidence man."

Goodyear had come to London to show once and for all that whatever his rivals might claim, he was the true inventor of the miracle material. Arriving that spring, he rented a suite of rooms, borrowed or bought a horse and carriage and hired a driver. Sparing no expense, Goodyear hired architect Stannard Warne to design his exhibit.
Sometime after the May 1 opening, Goodyear bought tickets for his wife, Clarissa, and four of their five children, and instructed them to meet him outside. Waiting until the last minute, as was his habit, Goodyear came out to meet them near a large statue of a mounted Richard the Lion-Hearted. Thousands of visitors clustered near the entrance. Clarissa, wearing a yellow silk dress with a blue shawl, reached up to take her husband's arm. The Goodyears fed themselves into the currents of humanity and entered.
Charles Goodyear stepped unevenly—his gout was acting up—and used a walking stick with a sculpted hard rubber handle. He directed the family to look down the long transept. Sculptured figures (his teenage daughter Cynthia squelched a giggle at the naked forms) stood in many places in the hall. Charles turned his head to the right to show Clarissa the east end of the nave and the United States of America department, where mannequins of Native Americans stood in front of a teepee. Looking left, Clarissa saw the display from England and her colonies. The family proceeded through the exhibition hall, through the Medieval Court, with its imposing neo-Gothic furniture, past the Turkish department, with its kafeyah-capped attendants. Then they stopped awhile at a refreshment stand for iced syrups. Still, they had not set eyes on Charles' exhibit. Finally, Goodyear led his family up a staircase to a gallery on the second floor. There was a canopied suite with the word "Goodyear" above it.

Unlike the Macintosh exhibit, Goodyear didn't just display a handful of rubber objects, but created a vision of a rubber-made world. An entire facade of hard rubber had been constructed across the face of his exhibit. On stepping inside, visitors found they were looking at walls and ceilings covered with rubber veneer and furniture cast in or coated with rubber. Hydrogen-filled rubber balloons of all colors, some as big as six feet in diameter, floated in the air, and portraits painted on rubber sheet hung on the walls. Arrayed in display cases were rubber plates, trays, boxes (some with inlaid pearl), bracelets, brooches, rings, fans, picture frames, eye glasses, ink stands, paper folders, pencil cases, cups and buttons. In other cases Goodyear placed medical instruments, canes, umbrellas, combs and brushes. Rubber curtains and fabrics hung from the walls. Potted rubber plants sat on pedestals on either side of the entrance.

Goodyear had spent about $30,000 dollars on his creation. It was an astonishing amount, but it paid off. He was one of only three Americans, along with McCormick and Borden, to take home the top award, a Council Medal. The once-desperate man shambling around in the blistered rubber jacket had placed himself among the great inventors of his time. Soon, his licensees would become one of the most powerful monopolies of antebellum America. His legend would outlive the monopoly that bore his name and his own fluctuating personal fortune. In the end his name would become synonymous with the heroic, solitary inventor who risked everything for his ideas. The name became so valuable that a new generation of rubber entrepreneurs would steal it to create an air of legitimacy for their rubber company, just in time for the age of the automobile. But while almost everyone knew his name and miraculous discovery, few knew the rest of the Goodyear story."