Charles Goodyear: Vulcanized Rubber, Debtors' Prisons and Ruin

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Charles Goodyear was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1800 and worked with his father making ivory and metal buttons and farm tools before opening a hardware store in Philadelphia. Around 1830 chronic dyspepsia and failed ventures bankrupted him. Natural rubber at the time melted into stinking goo in summer and cracked in winter, and when Goodyear offered an improved inflation valve to the Roxbury Rubber Company, its manager told him the whole industry was collapsing under returned goods. Jailed for debt in Philadelphia, Goodyear began experimenting on rubber in his cell. In a New York attic his family foraged for food, and two of his young sons died during this period of poverty.

Magnesia and quicklime failed when a drop of weak acid undid the cure. A nitric acid surface treatment earned a letter from President Andrew Jackson, but the fumes nearly killed him and the Panic of 1837 wiped out his Staten Island backer. In 1839, at the Eagle India Rubber Company in Woburn, Massachusetts, he dropped a rubber and sulfur mix on a hot stove and it charred like leather instead of melting. He called the process vulcanization and won U.S. patent 3633 in 1844, but Thomas Hancock took the British patent weeks earlier after smelling sulfur on Goodyear samples. Daniel Webster won his U.S. case in 1851. Goodyear died in New York in July 1860, aged 59, after learning his daughter had died, leaving nearly $200,000 in debt.

• He walked three miles to a Greenwich Village mill to test his early mixtures.
• Heat lets sulfur atoms cross-link rubber's polymer chains, so the material no longer melts or snaps.
• A British court ruled for Hancock in 1855 because he deduced the method independently.
• France awarded him the Legion of Honor while he sat in a Paris debtors' prison over his 1855 exhibition costs.
• Frank Seiberling named his 1898 Ohio tire company after him, decades after his death.