Excerpt from Beehives of Invention: Edison and His Laboratories Little did he realize that his project was futile. He made rubber from goldenrod, and Firestone even made four tires out of it, but it was expensive rubber and of inferior quality. And meanwhile, German scientists were successfully producing a synthetic rubber from coal tars. If anyone, Ford and Firestone included, had any suspicions that Edison's experiments would not succeed, they didn't tell him. Edison probably would not have listened anyway. Thomas A. Edison was dying. He had been suffer ing for years from diabetes, Bright's disease, and a gastric ulcer. Uremia almost took him in 1929, when he was 82. But, as always, he tried to work. When in bed, his assistants kept him informed of progress in the rubber experiments. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.