Rubber Capital: How Akron Put America on Wheels
Near Akron, Ohio
In eighteen seventy, a businessman from New York named Benjamin Franklin Goodrich relocated his rubber manufacturing operation to Akron. It was not an obvious choice. Akron was a mid-sized canal town in northeast Ohio. But it had good rail connections, cheap land, and proximity to markets. Within a decade, the decision looked prophetic.
In eighteen ninety-eight, Frank and Charles Seiberling founded the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, naming it after the man who had vulcanized rubber in the eighteen forties, Charles Goodyear, who had died impoverished. In nineteen hundred, Harvey Firestone moved to Akron and founded his own company. In nineteen fifteen, William O'Neil added General Tire.
By the early twentieth century, four of the five largest tire companies in the United States were headquartered within a few miles of each other in Akron. The city was manufacturing the majority of every tire rolling on every American road. It called itself the Rubber Capital of the World, and no one argued with it.
The industry transformed the city completely. Akron's population grew from thirty thousand in eighteen ninety to two hundred ninety thousand by nineteen sixty. Workers poured in from Appalachia, from the American South, from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The rubber plants ran around the clock in three shifts, seven days a week. The smell of processing rubber hung permanently over the city like a signature.
What made the rubber companies successful also made them vulnerable. All of them built their business on the bias-ply tire, a design that worked well and that American manufacturers had optimized for decades. When the French company Michelin developed the radial tire in the nineteen forties, it was simply better: safer, longer-lasting, more fuel-efficient. American companies were slow to switch, taking decades to catch up. By the time they understood what was happening, the market had already shifted.
