• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Along the way he befriended a young Englishman. Goodyear gave him a few of his successful samples and asked him to seek investors in Britain. By a circuitous path two thin, inch-and-a-half-long strips of Goodyear’s processed rubber ended up in the fall of 1842 at the laboratory of Thomas Hancock, a Manchester engineer who had developed processes for manipulating rubber. Hancock had no idea where these bits of rubber had originated. But he quickly realized that they didn’t melt in hot weather or become stiff in cold weather. The question was whether he could duplicate the accomplishment. It is unclear how much he was able to learn from Goodyear’s samples. Later he claimed to have “made no analysis of these little bits” from the other man—a remarkable demonstration of incuriosity, if true. In any case Hancock was more organized and knowledgeable than Goodyear and had better equipment. For a year and a half he systematically performed hundreds of small experiments. Eventually he, too, learned that immersing rubber in melted sulfur would transform it into something that would stay stretchy in cold weather and solid in hot weather. Later he called the process “vulcanization,” after the Roman god of fire. The British government granted Hancock a patent on May 21, 1844.

Identifying the inventor of the process of vulcanization, which makes rubber usable for industrial purposes, is complex. Charles Goodyear (left) had the basic idea first, but never fully understood the process; Thomas Hancock (right) patented the process before Goodyear and understood it better, but likely derived inspiration from seeing Goodyear’s initial samples. (Photo credit 7.2)

Three weeks later, the U.S. government awarded Goodyear his vulcanization patent. A glance at the patent shows that Goodyear never fully understood the process: a key ingredient, he claimed, was white lead, a metal-based pigment whose effect on rubber’s stability is “secondary, if anything,” according to E. Bryan Coughlin, of the Silvio O. Conte National Center for Polymer Research at the University of Massachusetts. “I’m not sure, because it’s not a standard treatment—maybe it has some catalytic effect.” By contrast, Coughlin told me, Hancock’s patent was “pretty straightforward.” Hancock stirred softened rubber into sulfur heated to 240°–250° F, just above its melting point. The longer he subjected it to heat, the more elasticity it lost. “That’s pretty much what I teach my students,” Coughlin said.

Goodyear didn’t understand the recipe for vulcanization, but he did understand that at last he had a business opportunity. Showing a previously unsuspected knack for publicity stunts, he spent $30,000 he did not have to create an entire room made of rubber for the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London, the first world’s fair. Four years later he borrowed $50,000 more to display an even more lavish rubber room at the second world’s fair, the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Parisians lost their urban hauteur and gawped like rubes at Goodyear’s rubber vanity table, complete with rubber-framed mirror; arranged on the top was a battalion of rubber combs and rubber-handled brushes. In the center of the rubber floor was a hard rubber desk with a rubber inkwell and rubber pens. Rubber umbrellas stood at attention in a rubber umbrella-stand in the corner of two rubber walls, each decorated with paintings on rubber canvases. For weapons fans, there was a stand of knives in rubber sheaths, swords in rubber scabbards, and rifles with rubber stocks. Except for the unpleasant rubber smell, Goodyear’s exhibit was a triumph. “Napoleon III invested him with the Legion of Honor,” wrote the diplomat and historian Austin Coates, “and a Paris court sent him to prison for debt.” He received the medal in his cell. Goodyear was forced to sell some of his wife’s possessions to pay for their trip home. He died four years later, still awash in debt.

Afterward, Americans lionized Goodyear as