Charles Goodyear and the Accident That Changed Everything
Near New Haven, Connecticut
Charles Goodyear was born in New Haven in eighteen hundred. His father ran a hardware business that went bankrupt. Goodyear spent much of his early adult life in debt, including time in debtors' prison. He became obsessed with rubber, specifically with the problem that natural rubber presented. In the summer it melted and stank. In the winter it cracked and shattered. The material that seemed promising as waterproofing became useless at temperature extremes. Goodyear was convinced there was a way to stabilize it.
He spent years experimenting, often in his own house, mixing rubber with every substance he could find. He tried magnesia. He tried lime. He tried nitric acid. He tried bronze powder. Nothing held. In eighteen thirty-nine, while working at the Eagle India Rubber Company in Woburn, Massachusetts, he combined rubber and sulfur and exposed the mixture to heat. The result was different. The rubber did not melt. It remained flexible, durable, stable across a range of temperatures. He called the process vulcanization, after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.
He patented the improved process in eighteen forty-four, but patent enforcement proved impossible. Other manufacturers copied the method and Goodyear spent years and substantial money in litigation. He died in eighteen sixty, deeply in debt, having never made the fortune his invention created for others.
His name lives in the company Goodyear Tire and Rubber, founded in Akron, Ohio in eighteen ninety-eight, thirty-eight years after his death, by a man who had never met him. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery, a short walk from the Green.
