Charles Goodyear

American inventor

• Born: December 29, 1800
• Birthplace: New Haven, Connecticut
• Died: July 1, 1860
• Place of death: New York, New York

Goodyear is remembered for inventing the first practical process for vulcanizing rubber, which made possible an immense range of products that have become central to everyday life—from pneumatic tires to modern condoms.

Early Life

Charles Goodyear was the first child born to Amasa Goodyear and Cynthia Bateman Goodyear, whose family later grew to include six children. Stephen Goodyear, an ancestor from London, had been one of a group of merchants who founded a colony in New Haven in 1638. Amasa Goodyear was also a merchant, selling hardware supplies to farmers, as well as an inventor. One of his patented farm tools was a hay pitchfork made from steel; it was a great improvement over the heavy cast-iron pitchforks that were used during the early nineteenth century.

Charles attended public schools in New Haven and Naugatuck, Connecticut, his father having moved the family in 1807 to a farm near Naugatuck to take advantage of a water-powered factory he had bought there. Charles helped his father, to whom he was a close companion, at both the factory and the farm. Contemporaries remembered him as a serious youth with a studious nature. An excellent Bible student, he considered being a minister, but when he finished public school at the age of seventeen, he agreed with his father that he should enter the hardware business and was apprenticed, as a clerk, to a large Philadelphia hardware store run by the Rogers family.

Charles’s tenure at the store was brief. He felt overworked, and his small, frail body soon wore out; ill health forced him to return to his father’s house. Amasa Goodyear worked with his son as a business partner starting in 1826; together they sought to improve the farm tools of their era. During this time, in August of 1824, Charles married Clarissa Beecher, whose father was an innkeeper in Naugatuck.

Amasa Goodyear soon felt that his hardware sales were sufficiently good for him to open a branch store in Philadelphia. He sent his son to manage the new store; there the Goodyears sold only American-made goods, becoming the first United States hardware firm to eliminate British imports. However, the young Goodyear’s business sense was not acute. He often sold goods on credit, as did his father in Connecticut, and reached a point where his creditors became too numerous and he was deep in debt. Rather than declare bankruptcy (as the law allowed), he decided to pay off his debts gradually. When young Goodyear’s creditors pressed for their money, he was put in debtor’s prison for the first time. This was in 1830 in Philadelphia. Charles Goodyear would spend time in and out of debtor’s prison for the next ten years.

During one of the times Goodyear was out of prison, in 1834, he traveled to New York to try to secure bank loans to pay his debts. He was caught in a harsh rainstorm on the streets of Manhattan and entered the Roxbury IndiaRubber Company to get dry. Inside the store, he noticed a life preserver made with a faulty valve. He purchased it, hoping to redesign the valve and impress the firm’s owners. Perhaps they would pay him for his invention. Goodyear spent the next few weeks on this project, but when he returned to the Roxbury Company with a perfected valve, he was surprised to learn of the great difficulties the firm was having with rubber goods.

Rubber goods had been produced and marketed in the United States since 1830. The demand for these products was high, especially in New England, where residents wore rubber boots and raincoats. The gum rubber that was used to make these items, however, was a sticky substance that melted in the summer and froze in the winter. When Goodyear first contacted the Roxbury Company, it was closing down. Goodyear came away from this encounter with the idea of curing rubber so it could be used more readily for clothing, life preservers, and other goods.

Life’s Work

When Charles Goodyear returned to his Philadelphia home in the summer of 1834, he began what would be a five-year period of experimenting to cure rubber. Because he was not trained in chemistry, his experiments were conducted on a trial-and-error basis. He worked in the kitchen of his small cottage, or in prison when he was confined there. He was fortunate in that gum rubber was inexpensive and plentiful. Goodyear had no tools, so he worked the rubber with his hands. He first mixed it with a variety of substances (one at a time) to see if he could eliminate its stickiness. The good properties of rubber that he wished to retain were its elasticity and flexibility, along with its strength. Among the items Goodyear mixed with rubber were sand, ink, castor oil, witch hazel, and even salt, pepper, and sugar.

When Goodyear tried a mixture of rubber, magnesia, and quicklime, he thought he had a successful type of rubber. It appeared smooth and flexible and was no longer sticky. He jubilantly announced his news of a discovery to the press. He even produced some small items from the mixture to display at two institute fairs in New York in 1835, the New York American Institute and the New York Mechanics’ Institute. Although both fairs awarded Goodyear prize medals for his discovery, it soon proved to be a failure. This treated or “tanned” rubber, as he called it, was destroyed when any acid (even a very weak acid) came in contact with it.

Goodyear was not discouraged by this failure; rather, he continued to mix other substances with gum rubber to find a useful compound. So intent was he to promote his products that he would dress all in rubber.

The hardships Goodyear and his family endured while he worked to perfect rubber were many. They often had no shelter, at one point living in an abandoned rubber factory on Staten Island, or no food—neighbors reported seeing the Goodyear children digging in their gardens for half-ripe potatoes. They never had money; Goodyear sold furnishings and even his children’s school books to purchase supplies.

The only way the family survived was by Goodyear’s finding a series of financial backers for his experiments. Among the men who funded him were Ralph Steele of New Haven and later William de Forest, who had been a tutor to young Charles and later would become his brother-in-law. De Forest’s total investment in Goodyear’s work rose to almost fifty thousand dollars. Another pair of backers, William and Emery Ryder of New York, had to withdraw all their funds when the economic panic of 1837 ruined them financially.

On June 17, 1837, Goodyear had obtained a patent for a procedure to treat rubber that he called the “acid-gas process.” The bankruptcy of the Ryder brothers shortly thereafter, however, gave Goodyear another setback—only a temporary one, however, for he soon met John Haskins in New York, who next helped him. Haskins was the former owner of the Roxbury India Rubber Company; he still owned an empty factory in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and Goodyear and his family moved to nearby Woburn. Goodyear manufactured various rubber items using the acid-gas process; among the thin products he sold in 1838 were tablecloths and piano covers.

Goodyear had another meeting while he resided in Woburn. He became acquainted with Nathaniel Hayward, who had himself worked out a method of treating rubber. Hayward mixed gum rubber with sulphur and set the substance to dry in the sun; he called his process “solarization.” Sharing their knowledge, Goodyear and Hayward began manufacturing what they believed to be permanent rubber products, no longer sticky and not likely to melt or freeze. As their reputation grew, the two men were awarded a U.S. government contract to produce 150 mailbags. After they had completed their order, they were disheartened to see that all the bags melted in the summer heat.

Ironically, although totally defeated (financially and publicly) by the mailbag disaster, Goodyear was close to a successful curing of rubber. In the winter of early 1839, he accidentally dropped a piece of a ruined mailbag on the stove in his Woburn kitchen. He noticed that the sulphur-treated rubber did not melt, but charred as leather would when burned. Goodyear had worked long enough with rubber to realize he now had made a major breakthrough. The piece of charred rubber, when hung in the winter air overnight, also did not freeze.

The inventor still had a problem—no one, except his family, believed his new method was a success. Because of his past failures, the American press and any financial backers considered Goodyear a disturbed man who would never make a genuine discovery. It would be five more years before Charles Goodyear could slowly perfect his new treatment of rubber and have it patented on June 15, 1844. By that time, samples of Goodyear’s new rubber had reached England, where one inventor, Thomas Hancock, had copied Goodyear’s process. Hancock successfully obtained a British patent on this method of treating rubber, which he called “vulcanization,” after the Roman god of fire, Vulcan.

Goodyear, however, did hold the American patent on vulcanization. When his countrymen began to realize that Goodyear finally had a truly usable product, he began to earn money. Royalties were paid to Goodyear by each company using his process to manufacture rubber goods in the United States.

Even after his great success with vulcanization, Charles Goodyear continued to spend large sums of money experimenting with rubber. After 1844, he concentrated on devising new rubber products. He also spent large sums of money promoting his products, especially in Europe. In 1855, Goodyear had built two elaborate exhibits abroad. In England, at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, he built a three-room Vulcanite Court completely furnished in rubber, at a cost of thirty thousand dollars. In France, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, he constructed a similar exhibit for fifty thousand dollars. These expenditures, along with other debts, explain why Goodyear never became wealthy from his discovery of vulcanization.

Goodyear’s wife Clarissa died in England in 1853, worn out by their lives of hardship and poverty; only six of their twelve children had survived to adulthood. Goodyear himself had always been a frail man, but in his final years he looked very old (although only in his fifties), and he had such severe gout and neuralgia that he could walk only with crutches for his last six years. He collapsed and died in New York City on July 1, 1860, on the way to see his gravely ill daughter in New Haven.

Significance

It is ironic that Charles Goodyear’s experiments with rubber aided Americans and all humankind so greatly and his family hardly at all. He was able to renew his patent on vulcanized rubber during his lifetime, but his heirs were refused renewals. The Goodyear Rubber Company, organized decades after his death, merely used his name to promote their rubber tires; the company was founded by strangers.

The rubber tire, so vital to modern transportation, is considered one of the most important outcomes of Goodyear’s invention, as well as many other products essential to a life of good quality: in medicine, telecommunications, electronics—indeed, virtually every modern industry. It is difficult to imagine what daily life would be like without the availability of vulcanized rubber.

Bibliography

Beals, Carleton. Our Yankee Heritage: New England’s Contribution to American Civilization. New York: David McKay, 1955. Beals titles his chapter on Goodyear “Black Magic.” In it, he emphasizes the inventor’s personal life as well as his experimentation. This essay contains many details on Goodyear’s family life not found in other sources. Beals also provides an analysis of Goodyear’s character traits.

Chamberlain, John. The Enterprising Americans: A Business History of the United States. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Originally a series in Fortune magazine on famous American businesspeople. In his lively and engaging account of Goodyear, the author places emphasis on the inventor’s Yankee ingenuity. Includes a bibliography.

Gies, Joseph, and Frances Gies. The Ingenious Yankees. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976. The authors focus on how Yankee inventors helped transform a farming country into a powerful technological nation. A biographical sketch of Goodyear is included, as well as an extensive bibliography.

Korman, Richard. The Goodyear Story: An Inventor’s Obsession and the Struggle for a Rubber Monopoly. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002. Biography recounting Goodyear’s invention, patent battles, and other business struggles. The book features nontechnical explanations of vulcanization and descriptions of conditions in a nineteenth century rubber factory.

Patterson, John C. America’s Greatest Inventors. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1943. The author covers fully the lives and careers of eighteen inventors, including Goodyear. He includes interesting facts concerning Goodyear’s work and personal difficulties, motivations, and thoughts.

Slack, Charles. Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hyperion, 2002. Describes the rivalry between Goodyear and Hancock over vulcanization—a process that engendered business speculation similar to the Internet boom of the 1990’s. Although Slack discusses both men, he focuses on Goodyear, crediting him with greater persistence and business acumen than Hancock.

Wilson, Mitchell. American Science and Invention: A Pictorial History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954. A large volume that relies on period illustrations and photographs to describe the course of American invention. Concise and accurate on Goodyear’s life as well as his discovery, with descriptions of how his experiments progressed. Also interesting on Goodyear’s personal character.