Charles Goodyear and Vulcanized Rubber

Charles Goodyear's work is important to so many things we have in the 21st century. But his life and his work to create a stable rubber was full of problems -- many of them caused by Goodyear himself.

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  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

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  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And this is not the episode I set out to write. So funny. I was gonna do an episode on sneaker history. Listen, I probably still will. I still love shoes. But one of the things that I wanted to do in setting up that episode

• 2:39Speaker 02

  was to talk about Charles Goodyear because his work really led to the development of the sneaker industry because they need those souls. Like, that's the distinguishing characteristic of sneakers. And he had come up on our episode on raincoat history, but we didn't go very deep into his life story. And his work is really very important to a lot of the things that we have in the 21st century. It was, as I said, very pivotal to the development of the sneaker. But in the process of trying to give him some time for a little mini biography at the front end of that episode, I just realized he had to end up being the whole episode because I was intrigued.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Not in always a great way. I was also really frustrated. You're gonna see, you also will be frustrated with this man. Charles Goodyear is often described as a chemist. And I guess you could say that. It doesn't seem quite accurate to me because he was not the kind of chemist who was seeking to understand molecular science. He wasn't developing formulas. We talked about so many people in that raincoat episode who were also trying to figure these things out, like how to make a stable, non-sticky rubber. But they operated so differently from Goodyear because he was just kind of trying stuff out, seeing what worked. Sometimes having an accident and going, can I replicate that? Which sometimes happens in science, but he really was kind of just like trying things in the lab.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  He was not like a heavy science dude. And spoiler alert, I feel like I should also tell people, this is not the most upbeat story. There are some great moments where Goodyear gets really excited about his work. You too will likely become frustrated with him in the course of this episode because he made a lot of really dodgy decisions. And those decisions often caused the people that he loved a whole lot of suffering in the process. So that's who we're talking about today.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  So Charles Goodyear was born on December 29th, 1800 in New Haven, Connecticut to Amasa Goodyear and Cynthia Bateman Goodyear. Goodyear's family traced all the way back to the founding of the New Haven colony. Amasa was a merchant and owned a hardware store. The family moved north to Nagatuck, Connecticut when Charles was very young, and he spent his early life there. For some portion of his youth, Charles, who was deeply religious, considered a life in the clergy, although he did abandon that idea. At 17, he moved to Philadelphia, and he lived there for four years, and he worked as an apprentice in another hardware

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  store. And then, at the end of that four years, when he returned home to Connecticut, he became business partners with his father, and their business became Amasa Goodyear and Son. The early work of this career that Charles Goodyear was doing with his father's company gave very little indication of the invention that would make Charles famous eventually. They were known for their metal goods that Amasa designed and manufactured, including everything from buttons to farm equipment. So I guess in terms of ingenuity and inventiveness, maybe it's a hint, a 1912 book titled Leading American Inventors claims that the Goodyears were known especially for making really good forks. That cracks me up, specifically forks.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  You want to know where to get the best fork in town? These guys. Good years. Several years into this work, Charles got married to a woman named Clarissa Beecher. This appears to have been a good match and a happy marriage, despite the two of them having to get through a lot of difficult times. They had seven children together. Yeah, and I actually should say, I had written that note that Tracy just read about the number of children, that there were a lot of children that Goodyear had, and they didn't all live. And I actually had a hard time kind of untangling how many he had with Clarissa. There's also a second wife that's going to come up later on. So

• 6:52Speaker 02

  the seven, take it with a grain of salt, because I'm not 100%. The biography that I read that said seven... I did not untangle how they landed at that number.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  But they did have many kids together. But before they went through the tough times that Tracy just alluded to, there was actually a period of prosperity. Charles and Clarissa moved to Philadelphia in 1826 so that Charles could start his own hardware store. And initially, they did really well, but Charles ran into financial problems. This will set the stage for his entire life story. He often sold things on credit, which a lot of merchants did. But it seems like he was not very good at collecting payments. He also gave credit to people who maybe didn't really have anything to back that up. And he soon found out that he could not keep up with his own debts and the business closed in 1830.

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  This is one of those things that's a little bit weird because in a lot of write ups you will see about Goodyear. They describe it as his father's business failing. And that confusion may come from the fact that much of the stock in Charles's store had actually come from his father. So there was a connection between the two stores, but it was Charles's own store that collapsed. According to that same 1912 book we just mentioned, Goodyear refused to declare bankruptcy because he knew it would lead to the seizure of all of his assets, including any intellectual property. And because he and his father had come up with a variety of metal things, he didn't want to lose his rights to those.

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  And the consequence is that he apparently was in and out of debtor's prison a lot throughout his whole life.

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  I was not able to confirm this next bit to find hard documentation, although I did find a 1933 notice in the United States Gazette of Philadelphia that his home was being auctioned off by the sheriff's office, presumably as part of a default issue with a loan. For a while, the family was really scraping by. Clarissa was bringing in some money, looming linen.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  And Charles also notes in his own writing that there was a time during this period when their possessions were sold at auction to meet their rental costs. And this is something that would happen throughout his life. Goodyear later explained how he came to view rubber as a potential way out of his financial problems. He described in writing how he visited the Roxbury India Rubber Company in New York to purchase a life preserver. But when he examined it, he thought the rubber tube that was used to inflate it could be improved. So he went home and he worked on a new tube and then he brought that to the showroom. The person he spoke with thought that the new tube was indeed an improvement and that

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Goodyear might be able to solve another bigger problem. He told Goodyear that he should work on improving India rubber and that if he could, he would make a lot of money. He also mentioned that a lot of other people had tried and failed and lost a lot of money in the process. And Goodyear later wrote of this moment when he had this conversation in the third person stating, quote, "He was not before aware that the manufacturer was so imperfectly understood. He was blessed with ignorance of the obstacles which he had subsequently to encounter, but soon learned this much at least, that the difficulties which attended experiments with

• 10:28Speaker 02

  the substance, if not unparalleled, were of an uncommon character, from the fact that the experimenter, as well as the manufacturer, was obliged to wait the return of both warm and cold weather, at least 12 months and often longer, before he could know with any certainty that his articles would not decompose, or what were the results of his labors." So yes, there was this huge opportunity to turn his finances around, but it was also going to require a significant investment of time before any benefit would even be possible. But Charles Goodyear also realized that, quote, "That which is hidden and unknown and cannot be discovered by scientific

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  research will most likely be discovered by accident, if at all, and by the man who applies himself most perseveringly to the subject and is most observing of everything relating there, too." Basically, like, okay, science people can't do it, but I'm just gonna keep trying. So he took on this challenge. And the biggest initial challenge with India rubber was heat. So natural rubber, which was called India rubber, had a lot of problems in practical applications. Like indigenous people who live in places where these plants grow have been using natural rubber for millennia. But when we're talking about like manufactured products, it, there were issues.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  It could waterproof things, but it also melted when it got hot and it would stick to other things, potentially making a huge mess. When it melted, it would lose its shape and it didn't snap back. In environments that were hotter than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, rubber quickly broke down completely and it also cracked in the cold. So something that was coated with it for waterproofing would no longer be waterproof if it got too cold. Problems with snow boots, for example, have cracked rubber and wet feet. So if you had something coated in India rubber, it had to have this ongoing upkeep and reapplication to try to retain the benefits of the rubber coating.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and as Tracy said, indigenous people used it, but they kind of understood this and it was part of their annual cycles to maintain their stuff with it. Whereas to make things for manufacture, nobody wanted to buy into a thing that needed to be recoated. Not what a consumer product is about. We are going to talk about what Charles Goodyear did right in his early years of experimenting after we pause for a sponsor break.

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  The start of Goodyear's success with rubber was in 1835, when he figured out how to manufacture gum elastic, that's just another name for natural rubber, India rubber, into sheets. He added magnesium to gum rubber at a one to one ratio, then added turpentine to liquefy it, and then he spread that out onto marble with a rolling pin. One account said he borrowed his wife's rolling pin for the first batch. I don't know if that's true. Then, according to his own account, he quote, "also commenced the art of embossing on glazed cambrics." And he used these sheets of rubber fabric to start making shoes. And these were to be used for testing. These were not shoes that were going right to consumers.

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  And that's good, because they, like other rubber products, melted and stuck together in warm temperatures. He eventually arrived at, quote, "boiling the articles compounded with magnesium in quick lime and water, which appeared to have the effect of tanning the gum and destroying its viscous property." So he thought he had managed to solve that melting problem. By the end of 1835, newspapers ran this story, quote, "A discovery has been recently made by Mr. Charles Goodyear, by which India rubber, after having been dissolved, can be restored by a cheap process to its original whiteness, and the pure gum be formed into a fabric

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  that can be used instead of cloth, leather, or parchment, and can be molded into almost any form, and can also be combined in a variety of ways with cloth, cordage, and leather." Goodyear won medals from the Mechanics Institute and the American Institute that year for his rubber sheets. But if those sheets were washed with anything acidic, like even if someone put a little lemon juice in water to wipe them down, the lime in them was neutralized and they became sticky again. So in 1836, he was back at work trying to figure out improvements. And the solution was a little bit of an accident. He had tried a number of things which were not working.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  And then one day, he boiled a piece of his rubber fabric in lime with liquid bronze, like the metal bronze. And he was trying to coat this thing, but it didn't coat the entire fabric in metal as he had hoped. Some of it stuck, but some of it had just slid off. And so then he tried to get the bronze that had adhered to the fabric off using nitric acid, but that just made this ugly mess. There was discoloration and he threw that sample out thinking that whole plan was trashed. But then a few days later, he pulled it out of the garbage and examined it. And he found that while it was still pliant,

• 20:03Speaker 02

  in the areas where he had used nitric acid, it wasn't sticky at all. He recreated this accidental treatment with good results. And then he developed a process for it, which he called the acid gas process. And he patented his new rubber sheets that were made this way. He also designed a number of products using the sheets and he was soon manufacturing those things, thanks to a friend, William Ballard, who was willing to invest in Charles Goodyear. Feel like he's the first of many friends who foolishly invested in Charles Goodyear. In fact, all of his work had been possible due to Goodyear's friends being really generous with him, from loaning him workspace to actually giving him money. And it soured some of those

• 20:48Speaker 02

  friendships as Goodyear worked through multiple expensive failures. But Goodyear and Ballard also failed, and this time it was by no fault of Goodyear. Ballard ran into his own financial hardships and the events that led up to the panic of 1837, and he declared bankruptcy. The company folded. Through all of his ups and downs, Goodyear remained fairly upbeat, and he even made fun of himself. He included an anecdote in his writing about the development of rubber that he wrote decades later, about how he was always wearing things that were made from rubber sheeting. These were often made by his wife Clarissa. This was in part to

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  show what it could do, and also because they didn't have other things to make clothes out of. And when someone asked one of his friends how he would recognize Charles Goodyear if he met him, the reply was, quote, "If you meet a man who has on an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and shoes with an India rubber money purse without a scent of money in it, that is he." Goodyear continued on his own, making rubber shoes and housewares as almost a cottage industry, but he wasn't able to sell much. One of the problems was that rubber had developed a bad reputation. As Goodyear and other innovators had put rubber items to market in 1835 and 1836,

• 22:11Speaker 02

  a rubber craze had driven a lot of people to purchase rubberized items, only to discover that those items had problems. So people were not as keen to buy stuff made out of rubber. And retailers were also not that interested in stocking rubber products. Honestly, understandably. Goodyear regrouped, moved the family back to New Haven, Connecticut, where they lived with his parents, and he focused exclusively on waterproof shoes. And he actually did okay for a while. He wasn't flush with cash, but he was able to support his family. Goodyear also met another man who worked in rubber, named Nathaniel Hayward during this period.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And Hayward had figured out a method of combining India rubber with sulfur and curing it in the sun. And the result was a non-sticky rubber. Goodyear purchased Hayward's patent in 1839, and he also hired Hayward to work with him. Hayward became his assistant. The sulfur-treated rubber had the complete non-stick finish that Goodyear was after, but it came with other problems. He started making all kinds of things with this sun-cured sulfur method. And he got a massive and important order when the US Postal Service commissioned him to make mailbags. And he made those bags, and they turned out really, really well. He had treated them with chrome, lead, and vermilion to make a faux leather finish.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  This was something he was experimenting with a lot at the time. And in his writing, he stated, quote, "Being desirous to beautify the fabrics with a variety of colors, the writer used metallic and other colors indiscriminately for this purpose."

• 23:52Speaker 02

  He treated the mailbags and then he hung them in his workshop while he went away on vacation. And when he got home, those bags were in piles on the floor. The material was breaking down and it also smelled horrible. The rubber was rotting. He had not just been making the mailbags this way. He'd also made home goods and life preservers and they had been selling. And he'd also been crowing to all of his friends about his big government contract. And now people's stuff was falling apart. He had a lot of angry consumers and no mailbags to deliver on that contract. He wrote, quote, "Again, he saw those dear to him, together with his aged parents, stripped of the comforts with which they were surrounded.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Everything that he possessed was brought to the hammer for the discharge of private bills." Goodyear described this as a time of serious misfortune in his life. He was completely broke. He knew that he had alienated people, describing himself as, quote, "being justly debarred the sympathy of others." A lot of people told him that he should give up on rubber and go back to the hardware business. He did not do that. Instead, he tried to figure out exactly what had gone wrong with the process. And he believed it was the colorants. His process had been working perfectly on sheets of rubber, but these mailbags and other new products that had failed were thicker.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And it seemed that the sun curing process just couldn't reach the deeper layers of thicker items, so they weren't curing all the way through. But though this whole ordeal would probably destroy most people, and he did seem to have been in a downward spiral briefly, he bounced back kind of quickly when something else caught his attention. He wrote that he, quote, "had hardly time enough to realize the extent of his embarrassment before he became intently engaged with another experiment and his mind buoyant with new hopes and expectations, which, as it afterwards proved, were to be, for the time at least, more than realized."

• 25:58Speaker 02

  In our episode about the invention of the raincoat, we mentioned that it's often said that the discovery of vulcanization was kind of an accident, and that's true, although not in quite the way that we said in that episode. That was sort of a brief mention. It didn't get the kind of deeper dive that today's episode is getting. So we know now how things played out, at least according to Goodyear's account. He stated that he was visiting a factory in Woburn, and he brought a sample of some of the compound that had failed in the mailbags. According to him, the sample, quote, "being carelessly brought in contact with a hot stove, charred like leather." So it didn't melt. Goodyear described calling out to his brother and

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  some of the other people around to point out how interesting this was, but it sounds like they had kind of had enough of him getting excited about things and then having them fall apart. So nobody really paid much attention. But Goodyear really felt like he had identified something important. His accident made him believe that high temperature applied to a treated piece of rubber cloth could potentially remove all of its stickiness if he could just get the temperature and the exposure to it right. So he started a series of experiments. He found that if he heated sulfur to boiling, which is like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of degrees

• 27:24Speaker 02

  that you have to reach, he could put India rubber in it, and the rubber would not melt, and it would emerge intact, soft, and pliable. He also tried exposing treated fabric to fire and found that it did not melt, but it charred as it had done in his accident at the factory. Once he had proof of concept, he was all in on his new process, and he spent several months testing it. He tested a variety of different heat sources, and as he refined, he ran processes over and over to ensure the results were consistent. The rubber he produced did not break down in high temperatures. And as for cold, one of his daughters described seeing him nail a piece of his treated rubber outside one

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  evening before a cold night, and then retrieved it in the morning, and he was elated to find that it was still flexible and it had not cracked. So he had figured out vulcanization. He also gave the process that name after the Roman god of fire. So at this point, after all of that, this was a thoroughly tested process that addressed the problems that everybody was having with the production of rubber, and it addressed all of the problems that Goodyear had had with his own mailbags and other products. But just as his brother and colleagues had really not wanted to hear it when Charles noticed his sample not melting in that earlier incident, the consumer market

• 28:48Speaker 02

  was really not interested in vulcanized rubber. In addition to the problems with reliability of rubber products in general, Goodyear's failures were well-known. On top of those two problems, the idea of homeware goods was seen as a novelty. He needed to produce something bigger if he was going to really get a large-scale buy-in from a company or a government contract. And then there was the really big obstacle. All of the items he had vulcanized were processed in very small setups in Goodyear's home or in workshops where he was borrowing time. He just couldn't produce anything at scale to show that he had really figured things out this time.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  The rest of Goodyear's life was like an unending roller coaster ride, and not in a good way. We'll get into it after we hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter,

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  and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  During this time in Charles Goodyear's life, when he was perfecting vulcanization, his family was really struggling. In the winter of 1839 to 1840, there was a very heavy snowstorm, and the Goodyears were trapped in their home with no fuel to warm it and no food to eat. And remember, he had quite a few kids. Charles said that he was sick, but that he walked through the storm to the house of a man named Obi Coolidge, looking for help. This was a person who's kind of like a neighbor. They had said hi on the street once or twice, but they didn't really know each other. And according to Goodyear, he explained to Coolidge the situation he was in, including the work he had been doing in the previous years.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  And Coolidge not only gave him help with the family's immediate needs to get them warmed and fed, he also backed Goodyear financially for continued work, giving him additional funds to sustain his efforts. Goodyear was working at the time to create what he described as, quote, "a set of military equipments for specimens with the intention of vulcanizing them as soon as an apparatus could be obtained for the purpose." But once again, his luck tanked because before he could vulcanize these items, the rubber fermented and they fell apart. He had lost an entire winter's worth of work. He chalked the experience up to a learning opportunity,

• 34:54Speaker 02

  recognizing that he could not mix natural rubber with a solvent and then compound it with lead and sulfur unless he was ready to vulcanize that right away. Finally, there was a potential breakthrough, but it wasn't in the way that Goodyear anticipated. He was approached by a French firm called Ratier and Gibaud to license his acid gas process. But he didn't want to give it to them because he felt like he was so close to large-scale vulcanization and that it would be a far better process for them to license. This is really frustrating to read about because he continued to put his family in peril by saying, "No, no, just wait a little longer."

• 35:36Speaker 02

  When his two-year-old son was dangerously ill because he had not taken this contract, Goodyear wrote to a friend for help, and he got back $7 and a letter chastising him for not taking some sort of stable work to support his family. With money borrowed from relatives, Goodyear took some of his small home vulcanized items to New York and then once again got funding, this time from a man named William Ryder. This enabled Goodyear to set up a large-scale facility in Springfield, Massachusetts, and he started to gain some momentum. He started getting orders for goods, and he was getting the business in decent shape. When he got hit with another bit of bad fortune,

• 36:20Speaker 02

  he landed in debtor's jail again. He was $35,000 in the hole and people were filing claims against him. But this time, he took the option of declaring bankruptcy to get out of that situation. Even so, once he was free from prison, he continued to work until the debts he had were all paid off. Shockingly, that only took a few months. Yeah, that French company and others did start to to get license deals with him, and that helped him really get to a much more stable financial footing for a while. The 1840s started with great promise, although Goodyear was not entirely satisfied with the vulcanization process when it came to fabric, which was really one of the big

• 37:03Speaker 02

  applications of it. And the problem was that the fabrics that Goodyear was adhering his vulcanized rubber to just didn't always stay adhered. He tried a lot of different kinds of fabrics, and they all had this problem. He spent a lot of time, years, solving this problem, and it ultimately saw Goodyear abandoning this idea of adhering the rubber to fabric and instead directly mixing cotton fibers into his India rubber in its liquid form before he laid it out flat and vulcanized it. And this basically created an entirely new fabric. Additionally, Goodyear did not really want to run a factory. He was intent on licenses serving as his income, but he took kind of a weird path to try to get there

• 37:47Speaker 02

  because he kept inventing uses for vulcanized rubber and then building prototypes, not to put these items into production, just to show that this could be done. This was a very expensive way to do business. And he had taken so much time trying to perfect things that other chemists were now able to develop their own processes before he finally got a patent for vulcanization in 1844. That led to legal issues down the road. Yeah, we will talk about another patent holder in just a moment. His next goal was to showcase his inventions at world expositions. He spent years preparing to exhibit at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, where he showed off vulcanization at Frequent Flyer

• 38:32Speaker 02

  on our show, The Crystal Palace. He won a medal for his efforts. People really did recognize he had figured out a pretty cool thing. But even as he was still celebrating his triumph, he found himself embroiled in one legal battle after another. In 1852, he sued Horace Day for patent infringement, and he actually hired Daniel Webster to represent him. That was apparently very expensive. I saw one thing that claimed that he paid Daniel Webster $10,000 for that in 1851. He did win the suit, and he celebrated by taking the entire family to Europe. There was some business at hand on that trip. Charles Macintosh, the inventor of the raincoat, had a business partner named Thomas Hancock.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Hancock had patented his method for vulcanization, which also used sulfur in Britain at the same time that Goodyear was getting his patent. Goodyear, no doubt feeling confident after the whole Horace Day verdict, intended to sue on the grounds that Hancock had copied him. Macintosh, undoubtedly wanting to keep his company out of any kind of legal mess, tried to smooth things over and offered to give Goodyear one half of the patent that Hancock held if Charles would just drop his legal action. Goodyear refused, and later he must have regretted this because he lost his case. He could have had half of the British rights, but then he returned home with nothing other than a big legal bill.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are many versions of the Goodyear story that kind of tell his life story in parallel to Hancock. And there is the possibility that Hancock had gotten, there's like an apocryphal story that he got a piece of rubber that Goodyear had worked on and he smelled sulfur on it and that led him to his version, but we don't know that for sure. But Goodyear made one bad decision after another, including going, no, no, I don't need all the money that you're gonna make. That's fine, I'll make it all, and he didn't make any. The bad luck also continued. Clarissa, Goodyear's wife of almost 30 years at that point, died in March of 1853.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  He did remarry a year later to a woman from London named Fanny Wardell. In the months after Clarissa's death, Goodyear wrote and published his own account of his life and work titled Gum Elastic and Its Varieties, with a detailed account of its applications and uses and of the discovery of vulcanization.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  This book definitely reads as though one of its goals is to establish Goodyear as the inventor of vulcanized rubber. He opens the book, which is more than 500 pages long, with, quote, "The writer finds himself so identified with the subject that he deems it impossible to give a correct history of the recent inventions in gum elastic without alluding to himself oftener than he could wish by speaking of the trials and discouragements which he had to encounter during the first seven years of his experiments." In this writing, Goodyear goes right to the basics. He talks about the ficus elastica and the Western world's access to it, that's the tree that it comes from, noting that while

• 41:48Speaker 02

  it grows in numerous regions, its accessibility and cheaper cost in India at the time resulted in most of it being sourced from there. And he describes the process of getting the milky rubbery kauchuk from the plant and processing it for use in various forms that happened from the 1700s on. He compares it and its uses to other substances like betumen and guada percha. He walks the reader through the problems of early rubber, which he calls gum or gum elastic. Quote, "In the early attempts to manufacture the gum in the United States, it was found that no kind, except that which had been cured, could be manufactured in any way into goods that would not, in a very short time, decompose."

• 42:34Speaker 02

  He noted that the way India prepped it for export was part of the problem, and he hoped that they would shift their methods as the global rubber industry grew and more countries started making their own rubber supply available. He also recognizes in this writing that due to his own advancements, as well as those of others, the applications that were making use of rubber were rapidly expanding. He wrote about this in a way which evidences racist bias as well. He wrote, quote, "The certainty that there will in future be a very great consumption of the various kinds of India rubber and waterproof gums has caused a good deal of apprehension with many as to the supply." And it is asked, where is it to come from? Will there not be a scarcity?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  It is true that owing to the sudden and rapid extension of the manufacturer, together with some commercial speculation in the article, the price has for the present year 1851 been unusually high. So he started writing this a couple of years before it came out, apparently. But this is a state of things which will not continue. The supply is literally inexhaustible. There is a belt of forest trees extending 10 degrees each side of the equator around the globe, which yield these gums of various kinds. And has been the case with turpentine and resin, the greater the demand, the cheaper in all probability these substances will be. When once the attention of mankind is turned to the subject, and that which is already being done,

• 44:03Speaker 02

  enterprising civilized races engage in the business of collecting it. Instead of relying on one tribe of Indians on a single river, there will no longer be any solicitude on the score of supply. The year after his second wedding, Goodyear was back in Europe for another world's fair, the Exposition Universelle of Paris of 1855. He spent a lot of money on this effort, a reported $50,000. He spent so much money over the course of the fair while he was in France. He once ran into money issues and ended up in a French debtor's prison. It's sometimes reported that he received the French Legion of Honor Medal while in prison, but Holly could not find him in the Legion of Honor registry.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Nope. Once he was released from debtor's prison in France, Goodyear, who had a long history of dyspepsia, was quite sick. He's often described as having a variety of ailments, but what they are is a little bit unclear. But he was sick enough at this point that he thought he was dying, and he actually sent letters to his friends and family saying so, and basically telling them goodbye. He and Fanny traveled from France to Bath, England, and he stayed there until 1858, so several years as his wife took care of him. He returned to the US in May 1858, having pawned his wife's jewelry to pay for that voyage.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  His business was a mess, but he was able to get his patent extended for seven years, and that offered a fairly decent income. Goodyear used the money he was bringing in to set up a new home in Washington DC. In 1860, he learned that his daughter Cynthia was dying in Connecticut, and he immediately set off by steamer to see her, leaving Fanny and their five-day-old new daughter at home. When this ship docked in New York, Goodyear was exhausted from days of seasickness, and he was also met with the news that Cynthia had already died. Goodyear was so stricken that he could not continue on to Connecticut, and he was taken to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Fanny hurried to meet him there after being notified that he was on his deathbed. He lived for several weeks after this and died on July 1st at the age of 59. Goodyear, unsurprisingly, left a massive debt behind, totaling right around $200,000. His son, Charles Jr., much better with money than his father, settled his outstanding debts and, using the remaining money due through patent licensing, was able to set up a fund to take care of Goodyear's remaining dependent family. When the patents expired in 1865, Charles Jr. sold the rights to the Goodyear name. Charles Goodyear's life was so full of ups and downs,

• 46:57Speaker 02

  and he was obviously a driven man and even a visionary of sorts. But the task of managing businesses related to his ideas was something he never got the hang of. He wrote of the hardship of being an inventor in this way, quote, "He takes the precaution to procure letters' patent for his invention, which he counts as property, but which amounts chiefly to this, that the government grants him permission to fight his own battles. Next comes the Herculean task of convincing the public of the advantages of the improvement, and yet the more difficult one of supplying the market with the improvement himself and of preventing others from doing it by encroaching on his patent."

• 47:42Speaker 02

  If his object is to derive a profit by disposing of his patents for his inventions, it is well known that patents are so commonly evaded in some way and that the patent law is so ineffectual for their protection that the public will not value them highly, if at all. Incidentally, if you're thinking, yeah, but there's a Goodyear company that still exists today. That was not started by Charles Goodyear or any of his descendants, although the name is inspired by his work. That company was founded in 1898, so almost 40 years after Charles Goodyear died by a man named Frank Seberling. Okay.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Did not know that. Me either, until I was working on this.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Do you have some listener mail? I do. I have so many thoughts about Charles Goodyear. Can't wait for Friday. I have listener mail from Teresa or Teresa who writes, hello ladies. I just finished your episode on the Uffizi Gallery and it had everything, international travel, art history restoration, Michael Kivlin quotes, labor protests. What prompted me to write was the date of the event. An event that happened in my own lifetime always makes me feel old, sure, but also brings me back to some questions I liked discussing with my high school students when I used to teach the history unit for a class called Theory of Knowledge. When does an event become history versus current events? What is worth preserving, whether physically or through story?

• 49:11Speaker 02

  Is the passage of time helpful or detrimental for creating a more accurate understanding of the past? Theory of Knowledge is a required course for kids in the International Baccalaureate Program, IB for short, and for a student in IB to write a history essay, they are required to write on something at least 10 years in the past. The election of 2016 could now be considered history? As if the 1990s being history isn't weird enough. I would love to hear your discussion on this. I no longer teach, but work in education policy, trying to make teaching better for teachers. I appreciate every single time you give a shout out to the teachers on your show. This episode had that too. I'll do it again. Thank you educators. Uh, since I've

• 49:53Speaker 02

  included pet tax in previous emails, and I know you like art attached are some of my artworks featuring my pets. Raku, the great Pyrenees border collie mix, Ruby, the super mutt are in the paper cut out Christmas card and Trilla, the very cute, but often evil elder cat in the form of a felted toy, partially made with her actual fur. Thank you for all your work and amazing stories you share with us every week. Um, I love this email because it brings up a thing that we talk about on the show sometimes. Yeah. But we haven't in a minute, and I think it's worth looking at. Um, we don't have a hard rule. We have rule-ish. Kind of. Of like, usually we don't do stuff that's like after, I don't know, 60s, 70s. Usually.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Occasionally, we've done something that's been more into the 80s. Usually something that was not such big news in the 80s that our listeners of a comparable age to us would have huge memories of it. Um, so the, the bombing part of the UFC episode was like more recent than we typically talk about. Yeah. Um, and the logic for me of that, and what often happens in anything that we end up talking about that is more like 80s, or in this case 90s, is that it ties to something much older. Yeah. And so for me, I talked about at the beginning of that episode, that what got me was that picture of the, or not that picture, that, that impression left by a window that

• 51:22Speaker 02

  they leave in one of the vaulted ceilings in the UFC. But it really, like what got me really excited was looking at how they're trying to preserve history that was lost. Right. And so that gave us, uh, an opportunity to talk about art, which I always want to do, and Bartolomeo Manfredi and like a little Caravaggio in there, which is also something I, I love talking about. Um, so it's kind of like a through line that brings us to that moment in the 90s, which is. Very pivotal to the story in that, you know, I tried to give as much information as possible within the confines of our show. Right. But it has to connect usually to something that happened much earlier than that for us to, to walk you through those decades.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's not a, like, there's not a hard and fast rule of when something becomes history. I'm a big fan of the Ask Historians subreddit, which is the, one of the best moderated communities on Reddit. If you're like, ah Reddit, they, their mods are on top of it. And they have rules about what is appropriate to both post and comment. And I, if I'm remembering correctly, their rule is a 20-year rule because that is sort of what they have come to feel like is an appropriate amount, like you have enough remove from the thing happening after 20 years to look back on it. And you could make arguments for amounts of time, longer

• 52:48Speaker 02

  or shorter than that, but that's sort of where they have arrived. And that has also meant that when a 20th anniversary of big, big things are coming up, they have to kind of like brace for all of the questions about that thing that are likely to happen. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I, we take it on a case-by-case basis, and there are times where we'll check in with each other and go, this is going to get into recent stuff. Do you think that's okay? Just as like a gut check. Right. I have also heard, I feel like I had a professor in college who said that their rule of thumb is it's history if it's the previous generation's thing. Like, you may have lived through part of it, but like, if it was really a thing that impacted

• 53:30Speaker 02

  your parents, it's, you could consider that history. And that's the thing, there's no, there's no rule, not just for us, but I don't think anywhere. You can't, you can make guidelines. Right. We talked about it a little bit in the, when we did the episodes about the Vietnam draft board raids. When we started working on this episode.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  I, or not this episode, this podcast, when we joined as hosts, the Vietnam War felt too recent to me. Yeah. But that was now more than 10 years ago, and we are farther from that now. So that felt less, less too recent for me. I have other reasons. Yeah, we're getting close to 15 years ago. Yeah, that's true. A long time. I think we're at 13 right now, at least from when I, when I came on. Oh, yeah. You came on a little, little earlier than me. So, yeah, yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  The other thing that you asked about in your email about like, do we get more clarity or less the farther things go back? This is something that like, the show I used to work on, Criminalia, was kind of entirely based on this. Like, if we look at crimes, historical true crime from the past, through a modern lens with more research, like, are any of these criminals and villains actually Oh, sure. misunderstood, which is often the case, right? A lot of women that were vilified throughout history, it's like, no, that's not what was going on here. I mean, we had cases on that show of women who were considered witches, and it turned out really, they were dealing with,

• 55:18Speaker 02

  you know, some kind of mental illness, or even a physical infirmity that made them other, that they got, you know, ostracized. Or like, there were people that when you, you look at the bigger picture, you understand, oh, they've kind of been the, the victim of bad press throughout history, because one person told their story, and that's what got repeated. We see that all the time on this show as well. And so, that is another thing that's case by case, right? Sometimes you have better perspective from a distance, but you also lose clarity in terms of like, being able to say with certainty what certain details were. This came up on your Elizabeth Blackwell Yeah, I was just thinking that. episode that you researched, where it's like, people thought she was born

• 56:03Speaker 02

  At one point, and she was this Elizabeth, but really, she's actually a different Elizabeth. And we only recently figured that out. Yep. And I say we, meaning historians, Tracy and I did not figure that out. She referenced the historian that did. One specific person who we cited in the episode. But so that too is a little bit case by case, I think. There are sometimes where you get a treasure trove of information kind of dropped that nobody knew throughout history and only came to light because modern, you know, living technology, records access enabled somebody to find it. And other times it gets farther, it gets more and more lost. Um, right. I mean, Thomas Harriet's another one. We didn't know he was the first person to look at the moon through a telescope

• 56:46Speaker 02

  because he didn't publish about it. They found his notes in the trash 400 years later. Like in a midden heap on his family's property. So we, we don't know. Yeah. We always love those surprises. That's why Unearthed is so popular. I think it shifts everybody's gears about what they think. It's gonna be time to work on that soon. I know. Um, anyway, that's the long answer to you.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  And I hope it was illuminating and not overwhelming. Uh, if you would like to write to us and ask us a question or share pictures of art, animals, whatever. Also, thank you for the art. We always love it. Listen, we love a little felted activity that's made of cat fur. You can do that at [email protected]. If you want to see the show notes and the, the resources that we use to put together an episode, you can do that at missedinhistory.com. If you would like to subscribe to the show and you haven't gotten to that yet, easy peasy, rice and cheesy, you could do it on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Stuff you missed in history class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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