Charles Goodyear patented vulcanized rubber in 1844

Charles Goodyear received U.S. patent No. 3,633 for vulcanized rubber on 15 June 1844, protecting the heat-and-sulfur process that stopped rubber melting in summer and cracking in winter. Untreated “India rubber” was so unreliable that the Great India Rubber Panic of the 1830s closed most of New England’s rubber factories.

The popular story has Goodyear flinging a lump of sulfur-treated rubber onto a hot stove in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1839 and finding it charred like leather instead of melting. The stove moment happened, but it was not quite a happy accident. A former business partner, Nathaniel Hayward, had already told him about mixing latex with sulfur and heating it in the sun, and Massachusetts historians note Goodyear may have placed the sample on the stove rather than dropped it.

Turning the clue into a reliable process took five more years of trials with ovens, kettles and finally pressure steaming. The treatment later became known as vulcanization, after the Roman god of fire. He paid heavily for it: Goodyear was jailed for debt, pawned his family’s furnishings and even his children’s schoolbooks, and saw six of his twelve children die before adulthood.

The delays also cost him Britain. Thomas Hancock, who reportedly saw samples Goodyear had sent to England, patented vulcanization there in 1843, months before the U.S. patent, and Goodyear lost when he challenged it in British courts. At home, infringers kept him in litigation, and when he died in 1860 his American debts totalled about $200,000.

His family eventually lived on royalties, but the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, founded in Akron, Ohio, in 1898, simply borrowed his name. Goodyear himself took a long view:

“A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps.” — Charles Goodyear