Goodyear was born in New Haven, Connecticut . He entered the hardware
business with his father but the venture failed in 1830. In the
summer of 1834 he walked into the New York retail store of the
Roxbury India Rubber Co., America's first rubber manufacturer
and showed the manager a new valve he had devised but the manager
shook his head sadly. The company wasn't in the market for valves
now and it would be lucky to stay in business at all. He showed
Goodyear racks of rubber goods which had melted to a stinking
gum in the heat. Goodyear disappointedly pocketed the valve and
took his first good look at rubber. He experienced a sudden curiosity
and wonder about this mysterious material. "There is probably
no other inert substance," he said later, "which so
excites the mind."
Returning to Philadelphia, Goodyear was clapped into jail for
debt. Whilst there he asked his wife to bring him a batch of raw
rubber and her rolling pin. In his cell, Goodyear worked his first
rubber experiments. If rubber was naturally adhesive, he reasoned,
why couldn't a dry powder be mixed with it to absorb its stickiness
- perhaps talc or magnesia? Once out of jail, he, his wife and
small daughters made up several hundred pairs of magnesia- filled
rubber overshoes in their kitchen but before he could market them
summer came and he watched them sag into shapeless lumps.
He then moved his experiments to New York where a friend gave
him a spare bedroom for his "laboratory." He was now
adding two drying agents to his rubber, magnesia and quicklime,
and improving the product all the time. He had now turned to decorating
and painting his shoes to hide the sticky surface and one day
he decided to re-paint an old decorated sample so he applied nitric
acid to remove its bronze paint. The piece turned black and Goodyear
discarded it. A few days later he found it again and realised
that the nitric acid had done something to the rubber, making
it smooth and no longer sticky. The timing of this discovery was
poor; the financial panic of 1837 promptly wiped out his business
and again he was destitute.
Soon after this came a pivotal event in his life; he met Nathaniel
Hayward. Hayward had discovered that treating thin rubber
sheets with a solution of sulphur in turpentine and exposing it
to sunlight (Solarisation) “causes the gum to dry more perfectly
and to improve the whole substance thereof” and this he
patented (USP1090) in November 1838. Goodyear realised that this
process could offer a considerable improvement in properties to
his rubber goods and rubberized fabrics so he purchased the rights
under the patent. Goodyear, rubber and sulphur had joined together.
He had, however, in hand a government contract for 150 mailbags,
to be manufactured by the process which involved treating the
rubber with nitric acid. After making the bags at Hayward’s
old factory in East Woburn, Mass. he relaxed and took his family
on vacation. When he returned, the mailbags had melted to a sticky
gum!
It was now 1839 and Goodyear pressed on using sulphur in his
experiments as a ‘drying agent’. One day, some of
his mix fell onto a hot stove. When scraped it off, he found that
it had charred but around the charred area was a flexible material
which he called "gum elastic" (or
perhaps the truth is somewhat different!). He had made what
today we call vulcanized rubber. But now he was very ill and had
only the first step of his great invention. He knew that heat
and sulphur miraculously changed rubber but how much heat was
needed and for how long? He experimented with hot sand, flatirons,
boiling water and everything he could think of until, at last,
he decided that steam under pressure, applied for four to six
hours at around 130°C, gave him the best results.
He wrote to his wealthy brother-in-law in New York who was very
interested when Goodyear told him that his new material would
be ideal for rubber threads to interweave with fabric thread to
give the fashionable puckered effect which was then much in demand
for men's shirts. Two "shirred goods" factories were
rushed into production and life looked up. Unfortunately for his
family, Goodyear was not interested in money and rapidly disposed
of the manufacturing interests which might have made him a millionaire
and went back to his experiments. His business acumen was terrible;
for instance he obtained 3 cents per yard for shirred-goods; the
licensees making $3 a yard. He was forced to fight 32 infringement
cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court but was slow in filing
foreign patent applications. Through Stephen
Moulton he sent samples of his heat-and-sulphur-treated gum
to British rubber companies without revealing details of their
composition in the hope of selling manufacturing licences. One
of these was seen by the English rubber pioneer, Thomas
Hancock. Hancock saw a sulphur bloom on Goodyear sample's
surface and, with that clue, he managed to make vulcanized rubber
in 1843, four years after Goodyear. By the time Goodyear applied
for an English patent he found that Hancock had filed one a few
weeks earlier.
Goodyear staged magnificent displays or rubber and hard rubber
(vulcanite or ebonite) at the London and Paris exhibitions in
the 1850s but, whilst in France, his French patent was cancelled
and his French royalties stopped leaving him with outstanding
bills he could not settle. Inevitably he was hustled off to a
debtors' prison. There he received the Cross of the Legion of
Honour, bestowed by Emperor Napoleon III.
When he died, in 1860, he was $200,000 in debt. Eventually, however,
accumulated royalties eventually made his family comfortable and
his son Charles Jr. later made a fortune manufacturing shoemaking
machinery.