Charles Goodyear
1800-1860
American Inventor
American inventor Charles Goodyear made important contributions to the practical application of rubber and its related industries. His discovery of the process of vulcanization, by which raw rubber could be made into a strong, malleable material, became useful for a large number of common products, most famously the rubber tire.
Goodyear's father was a New Haven, Connecticut, hardware inventor, manufacturer, and merchant specializing in farm tools, but also purveying items as diverse as pearl buttons. While attending public school, young Charles spent much time at his father's store, factory, and farm. He showed an interest in studying for the clergy, but his father saw a budding businessman and arranged for Charles to learn the hardware trade at a firm in Philadelphia. He did and, upon returning to New Haven and entering into partnership with his father, contributed to the success of their business, especially on the sales and merchandising side. He married a New Haven woman, Clarissa Beecher, in 1824.
In 1826 Charles and his wife moved back to Philadelphia to open his own hardware store, stocking mainly his father's products. By 1830 both Charles and his father were bankrupt, primarily because they were too generous in extending credit to their customers. Charles, although he had health problems on top of his financial ones, did not use the bankruptcy laws to assuage the pain. He was able to pay off some of his creditors by giving them interests in new Goodyear inventions. This was inadequate, however, and Goodyear was to suffer imprisonment for debt more than once before he died.
In 1834 he called on a company that dealt in India rubber goods, thinking a better valve might improve their inflatable life-preserver (and save the Goodyears from financial ruin). He devised such a valve, but the rubber company manager, more impressed by the ingenuity of its designer, told Goodyear of a better way to make big bucks. The rewards, he said, would flow if he could solve the rubber industry's big problem:
Charles Goodyear. (The Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission.)During the summer, rubber became sticky, melted, and decomposed.
Goodyear was inspired by the challenge and began to experiment with rubber. His first tests were made in a Philadelphia jail. Experiments with magnesia looked good in the winter of 1834-35, but deflated his hopes in the summer.
By 1837, then back in New Haven, Goodyear was relying on the charity of others, even to feed his family. Two New Yorkers helped him continue his experiments in that city. One gave him a room; the other, a druggist, supplied rubber and chemicals. That year he obtained Patent No. 240 and began to manufacture sample articles including rubber clothes. In his Gum Elastic and Its Varieties, Goodyear provided the following description of himself in the words of another: "If you meet a man who has on an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest and shoes, with an India rubber money purse without a cent of money in it, that is he."
A year later, Goodyear met Nathaniel Hayward, who had discovered that sulfur was good for taking stickiness out of rubber. His process involved the combining of rubber with a sulfur and turpentine mixture, then applying Goodyear's patented acid-metal process.
This set the stage for Goodyear's greatest discovery. Heat, rubber's old enemy, became its best friend. In an animated discussion with a group of interested gentlemen in his laboratory, Goodyear accidentally dropped a blob of the rubber-sulfur mixture on top of a red-hot stove. The pancake did not melt, but was transformed into a strong, pliable, resilient, unsticky (albeit slightly charred) material. He had discovered the process that would later be called vulcanization (named for Vulcan, the Roman god of fire).
Of course, the process needed development and refinement, which Goodyear undertook on borrowed money, most of it never repaid. Many people made fortunes from rubber, or in the case of lawyers, the litigation about its patents and processes. Goodyear seems to have piled up only debts until the day of his death. He did, however, receive accolades. In France he was awarded the Grand Medal of Honor and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
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