CHARLES GOODYEAR, 1800-1860
Courtesy, T h e Goodyear T i r e & Rubber C o m p a n y
I n the Kitchen of T h i s H o u s e on M o n t v a l e Avenue, Woburn, Mass., Charles Goodyear Made His Discovery Courtesy, T h e E. L . Patch C o m p a n y
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CHARLES GOODY EAR,
1800-1860 R . W . LU”,
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N AN article on any famous man, one feels that it is natural to examine his personal and social qualities. I n the case of Charles Goodyear the records on these points are almost silent. They seem to bear overwhelmingly, not on the man, but on his work. However, one does gather a few facts concerning the man himself. It is clear, for instance, that a t no time did he enjoy robust good health. The limitations to his physical activities may have found compensation in his enormous intellectual activities. Perhaps one can gather clues to his character better through indirect channels. Charles Goodyear’s mind was filled with ideas on the uses of rubber and with his ideal of producing a “cured” or (‘tanned” rubber. In the pursuit of his ideal he appeared to be oblivious of the material comforts of life. If he had applied his intelligence and persistent effort to any normal branch of business, he could scarcely have failed to make it a success. He preferred to pursue the solution to his problem on rubber. If this obsession had been less powerful he might have become a wealthy man, but the possession of money to Charles Goodyear merely meant increased resources for his work. He might have lived a relatively prosperous settled family life. Instead he carried his family with him through poverty and despair. He went to jail because he had spent all he had and all that he could borrow. He and his family suffered all the ills which usually fall upon those who spend their substance in riotous livingevidently the results of riotous living and riotous working can be very similar. Time and experience did not change the man; his mind was on one object and every other activity of life was secondary. His father was a man of a n ingenious and inventive frame of mind, and the atmosphere of quest in the search for better things was undoubtedly part of the atmosphere of the home. Some portion of mankind is always ingenious and inventive or progress would cease, but in the America of that period there was perhaps supreme scope for the man of inventive disposition. The needs of the country were many, traditions were few, rewards for success were great; and perhaps above all else, the men who lived and worked in that young America came of that pioneering group which had thrown off the bonds of the Old World and whose minds reached out freely toward new things. All the circumstances of the historical background, of the economic background, and of the mental outlook of the country and of the period tended to make men inventors, and Charles Goodyear was a giant among them.
The Problem A statement of the problem which Charles Goodyear set himself to solve is not difficult. A certain amount of more or less regular trade had been established by some of the merchants of Boston in powder flasks, water bottles, and particularly in rubber shoes which were produced on the Amazon by dipping formers in latex. I n the absence of any comparative standards, these shoes had been useful enough. It is true they became rigid in winter and very soft in summer; but from th? point of view of that period their main defects arose from design rather than from material-a state
Leyland, England
of affairs easily understood when it is realized that relatively ignorant natives of a subtropical region were trying to supply the needs of an active, intelligent, and progressive community which was making rapid progress in the control and use of the material things of life. It is natural that such a community should set out to take advantage of the properties of rubber which were demonstrated in an elementary form in these native productions. Some crude ideas on mechanical methods of manipulation had evolved, and the knowledge of the solubility of rubber in essential oils was a powerful weapon in the early development of production processes. An enthusiastic development of the rubber industry had occurred in America in the few years following 1830. The advantages to be gained by the use of rubberized garments, fabrics, and shoes had been appreciated enthusiastically; and one gets the impression that the troubles which inevitably followed were being optimistically overlooked in the hope that some beneficent providence would intervene to prevent disaster. Providence does not seem to work on those lines, and most of the companies which took part in this development met disaster and went out of existence. A public which could value the protection of rubber-proofed garments or rubber shoes declined to accept the inevitable inconveniences of goods which became soft and sticky in hot weather or of a boardlike rigidity in cold weather. Charles Goodyear had in mind that hides are enormously improved in usefulness when they are tanned and that iron is improved for many purposes by the addition of that small quantity of carbon which changes it into steel. He had the conviction that by some similar process rubber could be “tanned.” He was sure that all those desirable and useful properties which rubber had over a very short temperature range could by some process be extended over a wider range. Charles Goodyear set out to find a process by which rubber could be “tanned.”
The Work The work of solving the problem falls into three partstwo partial solutions and then complete success. Here was a man looking forward to the solving of a problem. But he had no complete realization of what the solution might bring. It might be a modest success or, as we can see now, it might go into realms beyond the power of his imagination. For a considerable time the adhesiveness of rubber was thought to be due to the influence of solvents. The power of essential oils to soften and “dissolve” rubber was known and used in the preparation of rubber-treated fabrics. Chaffee, in designing his (‘monster” or calender for use by the Roxbury Rubber Company in 1832-33, had expected to escape the troubles of adhesiveness by using his calender for skimming textiles with rubber, untreated by solvents, as an alternative to the solution-spreading process commonly used. He failed, of course, and Charles Goodyear was possibly the first to recognize that adhesiveness is an inherent property of unvulcanized rubber. This short appreciation of the work of Charles Goodyear
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will do him a grave injustice if it gives the impression that the three points selected for special mention represent the whole of his work. They represent the high points of achievement, but an enormous ground had been covered in experiments and trials, all of which had ended in disappointment. But in 1838 Charles Goodyear met Xathaniel Hayward. Hayward had found that, by mixing sulfur with rubber and exposing the surfaces to sunlight, the adhesiveness of the rubber surface was removed and did not occur again. This was his “solarizing” process, and obviously it marked a step forward in rubber technique. The process did not prevent rubber from becoming hard a t low temperatures or soft at high temperatures, but it dealt with the problem of stickiness. Its serious limitation was that only very thin rubber could be treated successfully. Charles Goodyear recognized the value of this process, for in 1838 he had Hayward patent it and then purchased the patent. Goodyear also recognized the defects of the process. He felt that although something had been accomplished, this was not the curing or tanning process which was his ideal, and he continued his work. The second stage in the search was the discovery of a curing or tanning process. The following descriptive note is taken from Goodyear’s own book, “Gum-Elastic.” . . ,commonly known as the acid gas process. This has been employed since a patent was first obtained for it by the writer, by generating the gas with a mixture of nitric and muriatic acid, and immersing the article in it while the acid is in a heated state; but latterly the process has become much more efficacious and practicable for general use, by first dipping the goods in diluted nitric acid, and afterwards in chloride of lime and water; this method renders the effect uniform without danger of scorching the fabrics; beside, it is much less expensive than the former method. The patent mentioned in this quotation is, by the way, dated 1837. The process described would give results similar to those obtained by the so-called cold cure process of Parkes, which was discovered in 1846. The goods would still suffer from the fact that the change in the rubber was confined to a very thin surface layer. This again represented progress, but it fell far short of Goodyear’s ideal. Here me reach the third stage, the crowning achievement. It is strange that after Hayward’s “solarizing” process was known to him, Charles Goodyear did not further examine the influence of sulfur on rubber, but in spite of this knowledge his thoughts were along other lines for a considerable time. He tells in his book the story of how he first came to notice the effect of heating a mixture of sulfur and rubber. He had been doing some work with a rubber-sulfur mixture and had put a piece of the material on top of a hot stove. His experience led him to expect a soft sticky mass of a kind with which he was only too familiar. He observed, however, that the mass had charred, not melted; obviously some change had occurred which seemed to point to the solution of his problem. He relates this story as being the first glimpse of the possibilities of what we now know as vulcanizing. He then set out to study the effect of heating rubber-sulfur mixtures, He used some strange devices, some successful, others disappointing, but out of it all grew a well-ordered method of curing in steam. Charles Goodyear had solved his problem in a Complete and satisfying fashion. The technical details were developed gradually, and in spite of the work done since on vulcanization, nothing important has happened to change the fundamentals of Goodyear’s process. Although Goodyear had worked persistently towards this curing or tanning process, his thoughts were constantly turning towards possible uses for rubber. He recorded these in his book, “Gum-Elastic,” and the number and variety
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of uses he mentions left few gaps to be filled. Thirty chapters are devoted to this record, but the importance of this work is overshadowed by the epoch-making achievement of the vulcanization process; in the absence of the greater achievement, it would have been sufficient to establish the name of a less great man than Charles Goodyear.
Tribulations Of tribulations Charles Goodyear had an abundance. Perhaps the greatest was his lack of good health. For many years of his life Charles Goodyear actually was an invalid, but for the rest of it he seems to have lived on that borderland of frail bodily capacity, spurred on by an intensely active and persistent intelligence. It is almost inevitable that he should have suffered through others stealing or attempting to steal his inventions. Many people tried to steal his processes, but in this matter one man stands out-a man of capable and truculent dishonesty. He was Horace H. Day. He infringed Goodyear’s patents with a persistent ruthlessness which would have intimidated a less courageous man. I n the legal battles Day lost, but through legal loopholes Goodyear was left with moral victories and Day returned again to the attack, This war between Goodyear and Day went on for about eight years and was finally brought to an end in a case which is famous in legal history. As his advocate Goodyear employed Daniel Webster, who upheld Goodyear’s claims with such clarity and finality that Day was compelled to abandon all further efforts to pursue his course. Goodyear had first experimented in vulcanization in 1839. His patent was dated June 14, 1844, and this famous lawsuit came to an end in September, 1852. As to his financial affairs, Goodyear appears to have considered his position good or bad according to whether or not he had money to spend on rubber experiments. He had sufficient faith in the ultimate outcome of his work to borrow as freely as his friends would tolerate. And frequently, when all resources failed, he went to jail. How going to jail could give satisfaction to any creditor is rather obscure, but it was an international custom and Charles Goodyear went to jail in America, in France, and in England.
The Beginning and the End Charles Goodyear, with the vision of his genius, saw many of the benefits to humanity which could come from the use of vulcanized rubber. He founded an industry to add to the comforts and conveniences of life, but it was not given to him to see that his work was the foundation for an even greater industry-the automobile industry. It is difficult to see how this industry could have developed without the use of vulcanized rubber, and vulcanized rubber in the form of automobile tires is by far the largest branch of production in the rubber industry. One would like to be able to say that, after a life of struggle against material, physical, and mental adversities, Charles Goodyear finally achieved that tranquillity which might be the reward of the truly great. No such state was in store for him, and his last years were spent in a very confusion of troubles. He depleted his finances almost completely by what we would now call propaganda and development work on rubber and its uses. He suffered through the dishonesty of his associates. His rights to the benefits of his work had to be fought for, and above all his bodily infirmities increased. His end was tragedy upon tragedy. I n May, 1860, his daughter lay dying in New Haven. I n spite of his own sickness Goodyear set out from Washington to see her before the end came. The strain of traveling compelled him to break his journey a t New York. There he heard of the death of his daughter, and on July 1, 1860, his own life closed.
