The Black and White photograph shows a man, perched on the edge of a wooden deck, looking

down at two objects. At first you can't take in what they are. In the background, the palm trees,

two other men, one with arms folded, the other with hands on hips, stare grimly at their friend,

or perhaps the photographer. It's hard to tell. That photographer was Alice Ceeley Harris, the year

1904, the location, a missionary outpost in Beringa, in what was then called the Congo Free State.

The man's name was Insala, as he explained to Alice, his wife and children had just been killed.

And here he told her, opening up a bundle of leaves, was the proof. All that the attackers had left,

this five-year-old daughter, Boale. Alice's photograph of Insala, looking at his daughters

severed hand and foot, caused an uproar back in Europe. And she found no shortage of other brutal

sites at which to point her Kodak camera. Printed in pamphlets and displayed at public meetings,

Alice's harrowing images formed the world's first photographic human rights campaign.

They helped build public pressure that eventually forced Belgium's King Leopold to loosen his grip

on the colony famously depicted in Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness. As the main character

Kurtz put it, the horror. But why was Leopold's Congo so horrific?

Rewind seven decades. To New York, 1834, an impoverished, unwell, but preternaturally optimistic

young man is knocking on the door of the Roxbury India rubber company. Child Good Year had landed

in debtors' prison when his family's hardware business went bankrupt, but he was sure he could

invent his way out of financial trouble. His latest idea, an improved kind of air valve for

inflatable rubber life-preservers. Good Year was in for a surprise. The manager loved his valve,

but confessed that his company was on the verge of ruin. He wasn't alone. All over the country,

investors had sunk money into this miraculous new substance, stretching and pliable, airtight

and waterproof, but now it was all going horribly wrong. Actually, rubber wasn't exactly new.

...