before he was sixteen.  At that age he set out for the West to make his fortune.  He made it, but after a long, hard struggle.  His trade of typesetter gave him a living in Illinois, New York or wherever he wanted to go, but he was not content with his wages or his hours.  However, he did not strike to reduce his hours or increase his wages.  On the contrary, he increased his working time and used it to increase his income.  He spent his nights and Sundays in making billiard balls, not at all the sort of thing you would expect of a young man of his Christian name.  But working with billiard balls is more profitable than playing with them—­though that is not the sort of thing you would expect a man of my surname to say.  Hyatt had seen in the papers an offer of a prize of $10,000 for the discovery of a satisfactory substitute for ivory in the making of billiard balls and he set out to get that prize.  I don’t know whether he ever got it or not, but I have in my hand a newly published circular announcing that Mr. Hyatt has now perfected a process for making billiard balls “better than ivory.”  Meantime he has turned out several hundred other inventions, many of them much more useful and profitable, but I imagine that he takes less satisfaction in any of them than he does in having solved the problem that he undertook fifty years ago.

The reason for the prize was that the game on the billiard table was getting more popular and the game in the African jungle was getting scarcer, especially elephants having tusks more than 2-7/16 inches in diameter.  The raising of elephants is not an industry that promises as quick returns as raising chickens or Belgian hares.  To make a ball having exactly the weight, color and resiliency to which billiard players have become accustomed seemed an impossibility.  Hyatt tried compressed wood, but while he did not succeed in making billiard balls he did build up a profitable business in stamped checkers and dominoes.

Setting type in the way they did it in the sixties was hard on the hands.  And if the skin got worn thin or broken the dirty lead type were liable to infect the fingers.  One day in 1863 Hyatt, finding his fingers were getting raw, went to the cupboard where was kept the “liquid cuticle” used by the printers.  But when he got there he found it was bare, for the vial had tipped over—­you know how easily they tip over—­and the collodion had run out and solidified on the shelf.  Possibly Hyatt was annoyed, but if so he did not waste time raging around the office to find out who tipped over that bottle.  Instead he pulled off from the wood a bit of the dried film as big as his thumb nail and examined it with that “’satiable curtiosity,” as Kipling calls it, which is characteristic of the born inventor.  He found it tough and elastic and it occurred to him that it might be worth $10,000.  It turned out to be worth many times that.