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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Charles Goodyear Biography GOODYEAR, CHARLES (1800-60). An American inventor, born at New Haven, Conn. He was the son of an iron manufacturer, with whom, at the age of 21, he went into business in Philadelphia. Unsuccessful in the iron trade, his attention was attracted to the manufacture of India rubber, and he expended all his means in experiments with various mixtures and processes which should remedy the fatal defects of India rubber in its natural state, since it is brittle in cold weather and sticky in warm weather. His efforts were a series of failures, excepting a partial success in treating the surface of rubber goods with nitric acid, until he bought of one Hayward, a rival experimenter, an invention for mixing India rubber with sulphur. The great secret of vulcanizing--a process in which the two substances, submitted to a high temperature, are converted into the elastic, enduring, and heat-and-cold-defying material now in use--was an accidental discovery made by Goodyear while standing by a stove and idly subjecting a mixture of rubber and sulphur to its heat. This new product he patented in 1844, discovering new uses to which it could be applied, until it required 60 patents to secure his inventions. Some of these rights were secured by other persons in England, and in France they were forfeited by an informality; so that, by these means and from expensive lawsuits, he gathered little save the honors awarded to his skill and perseverance. See RUBBER. Consult biographical sketch in Parton, Famous Americans of Recent Times (Boston, 1867 ; 11th ed., 1897) , and B. K. Peirce, Trials of an Inventor (New York, 1866). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. X (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 135-136. |