The first boots and clothing made from rubber had performed poorly in the American environment. They melted in the heat and cracked in the cold. Determined to find a way to make rubber stable and pliable, Goodyear moved his family to Massachusetts, where the nation's first rubber factories were located.
When one after another of his experiments failed, his family fell into poverty. Finally, on a winter's day in , Goodyear hit on a formula that worked. It took another five years, but in he patented the process. Charles Goodyear became a celebrity and vulcanized rubber became an unremarkable part of everyday life. When the automobile age dawned, two brothers from Ohio named their new company "Goodyear" in recognition of Charles Goodyear's contribution to the product they made — rubber tires. On a visit to New York City in , Charles Goodyear passed the Roxbury Rubber Company's retail store and was struck by a new product on display — a rubber life preserver.
Actually, what first caught his attention was the crude valve; he went home and immediately set about improving it. When the year-old returned to the store with his invention a few days later, the manager told him a sad secret: the one-year-old Roxbury India Rubber Company — the first rubber company in the United States — was on the brink of bankruptcy. Customers had eagerly purchased the shoes, boots, raincoats, and other items made of rubberized cloth in a Roxbury, Massachusetts, factory, but in the heat of summer the rubber goods turned into a gooey, foul-smelling mess; in the winter, they froze stiff.
The "rubber fever" of the early s that had spawned the factory in Roxbury and other towns around Boston cooled almost as quickly as it had heated up. In its natural state, rubber had a fatal flaw: it melted in hot weather and froze in the cold. This flaw had not been obvious in temperate Ecuador, where native people had been fashioning the liquid known as "weeping wood" into boots and bottles for centuries.
Nor had it first been noticeable in the milder climate of Britain, where Thomas Hancock and Charles Mackintosh developed a rubber-coated cloth that they made into "Mackintosh" raincoats in the s. Massachusetts entrepreneurs responded to the demand for clothes made from rubberized cloth by building factories, first in Roxbury and then in other towns around Boston, such as Woburn , 12 miles to the northeast.
There, on the banks of the Aberjona River, the Eagle India Rubber Company took over a building from a failed silk factory and began producing a variety of rubber goods — aprons, life preservers, hats, carriage tops, and, by , waterproof shoes. Then rubber's fatal flaw became apparent, and the "Great India Rubber Panic" of the s caused most of New England's rubber factories to close. While the rubber industry in America seemed destined for failure, Charles Goodyear had not lost faith.
He had no scientific training, but by , he had spent two years experimenting with rubber and was completely obsessed with it. After reading in a newspaper that 20 people drowned worldwide each hour, he had become convinced that he had a God-given mission to prevent such loss of life. Rubber life preservers, he believed, could be the solution. He did not have a job, but lived, barely, off the money he persuaded investors to advance him.
However, the first pioneer of rubber in the industrial age was Charles Goodyear, for whom the famous Goodyear tire company is named after. Goodyear was a self-described inventor who allegedly came up with the idea for vulcanizing rubber on a visit to a general store. He was looking at a life vest, which at the time, was made of natural rubber, and asked the clerk what it would take to make a better vest.
Often described as eccentric, Goodyear devoted his life and fortune, selling all his worldly goods, to pursue the goal of making rubber from trees into a useful material. Although British scientist Thomas Hancock was awarded the first patent on vulcanizing rubber in in the United Kingdom, Goodyear was awarded the American patent just a few weeks later. George Oenslager was an American chemist who invented cure packages which are an advanced method of vulcanizing rubber that are still used today.
In , he discovered a derivative of aniline accelerated the vulcanization process which greatly increased the cost effectiveness of rubber.
These cure packages often contain a curing agent like sulfur as an accelerator to speed up vulcanization, or a retarder to slow it down. Vulcanization is used in all sorts of processes to make rubber for everything from hoses to capital equipment.
Global O-Ring has in-house vulcanizing capabilities, and we regularly create custom o-rings by joining cord stock. We then use vulcanization to splice and bond the rubber into o-rings using heat and pressure to crosslink them and make a strong joint. Global O-Ring uses the most advanced and cost efficient processes to vulcanize our o-rings.
According to biographers, while working at the Eagle India Rubber Company, Goodyear accidentally combined rubber and sulfur upon a hot stove. And, when he raised the heat, it actually hardened. It would take Goodyear several more years to recreate the chemical formula and perfect the process of mixing sulfur and rubber at a high temperature; he patented the process in , the year after establishing the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company in Naugatuck.
Goodyear named his discovery vulcanization, after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. He licensed his patent to manufacturers and showcased it at exhibitions. The vulcanization process put Naugatuck, Connecticut, on the map as a leading site of rubber manufacturing during the 19th and 20th centuries. Numerous rubber companies operated in the town under the Goodyear license, including Uniroyal, which made the popular Keds sneakers. Eventually, foreign competition would bring down the rubber industry in Naugatuck.
He spent much of the fortune he earned from his patent fighting patent infringements in courts in the United States and abroad. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. Ann Marie Somma has worked as a print reporter for several newspapers in Connecticut including the Hartford Courant. Charles Goodyear and the Vulcanization of Rubber Facebook.
Naugatuck Emerges as Industry Hub It would take Goodyear several more years to recreate the chemical formula and perfect the process of mixing sulfur and rubber at a high temperature; he patented the process in , the year after establishing the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company in Naugatuck. Goodyear, Charles.
New York, NY, issued June 15,
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