B. F. Goodrich and the Rubber Gamble
Near Akron, Ohio
The story of how Akron became the rubber capital of the world begins with a young doctor from New York who had no business training and a factory that was nearly bankrupt.
Benjamin Franklin Goodrich was a physician by training, not an industrialist. In eighteen sixty-nine he purchased a small rubber company in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. The operation made fire hoses and rubber goods, and it was struggling. The following year, Goodrich received an unusual offer: the citizens of Akron, Ohio, pooled together thirteen thousand six hundred dollars in cash and incentives to persuade him to relocate his business to their city.
Why Akron? The canal was already there, connecting the city to markets in Cleveland and beyond. Rail lines were arriving. And Akron's boosters were desperate to diversify the local economy beyond grain and milling. They wanted manufacturing. Goodrich gave it to them.
In eighteen seventy, he finished a two-story factory on the banks of the Ohio Canal. The Goodrich, Tew and Company was the first rubber manufacturer west of the Allegheny Mountains. For years it teetered near failure. Goodrich himself died in eighteen eighty-eight, at just forty-six years old, the business's future still uncertain.
But then the bicycle boom hit in the eighteen nineties, and with it came demand for pneumatic tires, rubber inner tubes inflated with air rather than solid rubber. Goodrich's company was positioned exactly right. By eighteen ninety-six, B. F. Goodrich had produced the first pneumatic automobile tire made in the United States.
The automobile finished what the bicycle started. Within two decades, Akron would host four of the largest tire manufacturers on earth: Goodrich, Goodyear, Firestone, and General Tire. The city that had bribed a doctor with thirteen thousand dollars had become the industrial center of the global rubber trade.
