Charles Goodyear

Born: New Haven; December 29, 1800
Died: New York City; July 1, 1860

Entry by James P. Walsh

Connecticut has always enjoyed the reputation of nurturing a special kind of intelligence, usually called Yankee ingenuity. Indeed, considering the state's location, size, and lack of natural resources, Connecticut's transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy in the nineteenth century must have required large inputs of what economists call human capital. Behind that dry phrase, however, are a number of interesting biographies which tell of persons who with single-minded devotion to the solution of a particular problem devised machines or processes that stimulated the industrial revolution in Connecticut. No Yankee showed more ingenuity in solving such a problem than Charles Goodyear, and no other inventor derived so little profit or even recognition from his work.

Goodyear seems to have been destined for misery. Barely out of his teens, he was forced by his father into the family hardware business and sent to Philadelphia. Eventually his father's business went bankrupt, and Charles became liable for the debts. In 1830 he was sent to debtors' prison in Philadelphia, and for the next ten years suffered periods of incarceration whenever his creditors became impatient.

In order to rise out of his abyss of debts, Goodyear determined to make rubber a commercially profitable commodity. In 1837 he purchased the rights to market rubber products from Nathaniel Hayward and set about to solve the one great obstacle to making rubber a useful product, its tendency to crack in the winter and to melt in the summer. Goodyear mixed rubber with other elements, and thought he had discovered the right formula on several occasions. He even began producing rubber goods and advertised them by wearing a suit made of rubber. But his products proved to be defective and Goodyear fell even deeper into debt.

In January 1839 Goodyear finally discovered the right combination of additives and heat with which to treat or "vulcanize" rubber. Others soon copied Goodyear and America's rubber industry became established. But Goodyear himself reaped little advantage from this development. His reputation was so bad that he had trouble raising capital, forcing him to sell licenses to others to use his process at very low prices.  He found also that some manufacturers used vulcanization without paying him royalties. His struggle to profit from his invention cost him more time and money than he could afford. He had to spend eight years in Europe, for example, trying to protect his patent rights and wound up for a time in debtors' prison in Paris.

Nearly always poor, nearly always ill, Goodyear died with debts amounting to more than $200,000. He endured the agony of seeing four of his children die in infancy, almost certainly because of his own poverty. As a last, cruel joke played by fate, the tedious years of experimenting and the meticulous observation of results that finally led to Goodyear's discovery of the vulcanization process have been forgotten. It is still commonly believed that Goodyear found the secret by accident when he happened to drop some treated rubber on a hot stove.

For Further Reading

The best biography of Goodyear is Ralph F. Wolf, Indian Rubber Man (Caldwell, Idaho, 1939).

* Entry under revision.