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 ball made 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...