Charles Goodyear Discovers the Process for Creating Vulcanized Rubber
Overview
In 1839, a perpetually impoverished inventor who referred to a succession of debtors' prisons as his "hotels" rescued an ailing industry and made it a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Charles Goodyear (1800-1860) discovered a process for curing rubber, which transformed this remarkable but flawed natural substance from a curiosity fit for museums into the first of the modern plastics.
Background
During his second visit to the New World in 1493-96, Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) noted that native villagers in Hispaniola played a soccer-like game with a light and bouncy ballmade from the milky, white sap of a tree. The Indians cured the sap, called latex, by smoking it to evaporate out the water before forming the latex into balls. Subsequent explorers from Europe learned that latex, which was both elastic and sticky, could be pressed not only into objects for games but also into usable articles such as waterproof cloth, inflatable bags, and molded bottles and boots.
In 1735, the French mathematical geographer Charles Marie de la Condamine (1701-1774) sent back samples of crude rubber from South America, and described its botanical nature and the products that could be made from it.
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