Charles Goodyear was born at New Haven, December 29, 1800, the son of Amasa Goodyear and descendant of Stephen Goodyear who was associated with Theophilus Eaton, the first governor of the Puritan colony of New Haven.It was natural that Charles should turn his mind to invention, as he did even when a boy; for his father, a pioneer in the manufacture of American hardware, was the inventor of a steel hayfork which replaced the heavy iron fork of prior days and lightened and expedited the labor of the fields.When Charles was seven his father moved to Naugatuck and manufactured the first pearl buttons made in America; during the War of 1812 the Goodyear factory supplied metal buttons to the Government.Charles, a studious, serious boy, was the close companion of his father.His deeply religious nature manifested itself early, and he joined the Congregational Church when he was sixteen.It was at first his intention to enter the ministry, which seemed to him to offer the most useful career of service, but, changing his mind, he went to Philadelphia to learn the hardware business and on coming of age was admitted to partnership in a firm established there by his father.The firm prospered for a time, but an injudicious extension of credit led to its suspension.So it happened that Goodyear in 1834, when he became interested in rubber, was an insolvent debtor, liable, under the laws of the time, to imprisonment.Soon afterward, indeed, he was lodged in the Debtor's Prison in Philadelphia.
It would seem an inauspicious hour to begin a search which might lead him on in poverty for years and end nowhere.But, having seen the need for perfect rubber, the thought had come to him, with the force of a religious conviction, that "an object so desirable and so important, and so necessary to man's comfort, as the making of gum-elastic available to his use, was most certainly placed within his reach." Thereafter he never doubted that God had called him to this task and that his efforts would be crowned with success.Concerning his prison experiences, of which the first was not to be the last, he says that "notwithstanding the mortification attending such a trial," if the prisoner has a real aim "for which to live and hope over he may add firmness to hope, and derive lasting advantage by having proved to himself that, with a clear conscience and a high purpose, a man may be as happy within prison walls as in any other (even the most fortunate) circumstances in life." With this spirit he met every reverse throughout the ten hard years that followed.
Luckily, as he says, his first experiments required no expensive equipment.Fingers were the best tools for working the gum.The prison officials allowed him a bench and a marble slab, a friend procured him a few dollars' worth of gum, which sold then at five cents a pound, and his wife contributed her rolling pin.That was the beginning.
For a time he believed that, by mixing the raw gum with magnesia and boiling it in lime, he had overcome the stickiness which was the inherent difficulty.He made some sheets of white rubber which were exhibited, and also some articles for sale.His hopes were dashed when he found that weak acid, such as apple juice or vinegar, destroyed his new product.Then in 1836 he found that the application of aqua fortis, or nitric acid, produced a "curing" effect on the rubber and thought that he had discovered the secret.Finding a partner with capital, he leased an abandoned rubber factory on Staten Island.But his partner's fortune was swept away in the panic of 1837, leaving Goodyear again an insolvent debtor.Later he found another partner and went to manufacturing in the deserted plant at Roxbury, with an order from the Government for a large number of mail bags.This order was given wide publicity and it aroused the interest of manufacturers throughout the country.But by the time the goods were ready for delivery the first bags made had rotted from their handles.Only the surface of the rubber had been "cured."This failure was the last straw, as far as Goodyear's friends were concerned.Only his patient and devoted wife stood by him;she had labored, known want, seen her children go hungry to school, but she seems never to have reproached her husband nor to have doubted his ultimate success.The gentleness and tenderness of his deportment in the home made his family cling to him with deep affection and bear willingly any sacrifice for his sake;though his successive failures generally meant a return of the inventor to the debtor's prison and the casting of his family upon charity.
The nitric acid process had not solved the problem but it had been a real step forward.It was in the year 1839, by an accident, that he discovered the true process of vulcanization which cured not the surface alone but the whole mass.He was trying to harden the gum by boiling it with sulphur on his wife's cookstove when he let fall a lump of it on the red hot iron top.
