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An obsessed Charles Goodyear pursued useable rubber throughout his life
Sunday, September 17, 2000 By Deborah Mendenhall, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The story of the automobile tire and how it came to be began with Charles Goodyear, who languished in a Philadelphia debtor's prison in 1834 for failing to pay for a load of raw rubber he had ordered from a shoe factory.
As his wife struggled to feed their hungry children -- something she would have to do most of her life -- Goodyear asked for her rolling pin and a batch of raw rubber. He had just begun what would be a lifelong quest to turn the undependable yet promising substance into a solid.
Rubber had hit the U.S. marketplace in the 1830s, causing a firestorm of consumer demands for products that factories had scurried to meet.
But rubber, it seemed, was unstable. As products created from Brazil's new waterproof tree gum turned rock-hard in the winter and melted into a sticky goo in the summer, the rest of the nation had given up on it.
But not Goodyear.
To him, nothing was more fascinating. Not even his own squalid living conditions and hungry children could pull him away from what he saw as a mission. According to published sources, a relative once lectured him about neglecting his family, saying "Rubber is dead."
Goodyear replied, "I am the man to bring it back."
Locked behind bars in the debtor's prison, Goodyear conducted his first rubber experiments, reasoning that if rubber was naturally adhesive, a powder could absorb some of the stickiness.
Bailed out of prison, he moved his family to New York. With access to his wife's stove, Goodyear added magnesia and made rubber overshoes in the oven when his wife wasn't baking. But they soon melted into paste.
He added two drying agents, boiled the mixture and saw some success. But it wasn't until he was out of ingredients and added nitric acid to remove some paint on an old sample that he stumbled upon the answer. The nitric acid turned the rubber black and changed the texture to something like cloth.
With an investor backing him, Goodyear began production but was wiped out by the financial panic of 1837. His family moved into the abandoned rubber factory and lived off the fish he caught in New York Harbor.
Eventually he got more backing and landed a government contract to manufacture mailbags. Confident in his product, Goodyear stored them in a warm room, only to later find that under the "cloth" was melted goo.
After five years and nearly destitute, he moved the family to Woburn, Mass., where farmers allowed Goodyear's children to dig potatoes for food, and Goodyear continued his experiments.
During the winter of 1839, as the story goes, Goodyear was showing off his latest gum and sulfur formula in the Woburn General Store as those around him snickered. As Goodyear waved a fistful of gum, some of it landed on the potbellied stove.
Scraping it off, Goodyear discovered that instead of melting, it had charred into a leather-like texture. And for the first time, the area beneath the surface was stable as well.
While others called the discovery a happy accident, Goodyear believed it was the reward for "applying himself most perseveringly to the subject."
But success was still elusive.
The winter of his discovery was the worst ever. Suffering from bad health and gout-ridden, he hobbled on crutches trying to find the right temperature and baking time to create the perfect rubber. As his wife removed bread from the oven, Goodyear replaced it with rubber. He sold all their possessions, replacing the family dinnerware with rubber dishes.
Experimenting with steam under pressure, Goodyear finally achieved the uniform results he had long sought, after he applied pressure for four to six hours at about 270 degrees Fahrenheit.
But he soon sold off the manufacturing interests which could have made him a fortune and went back to experimenting. He created rubber bank notes, musical instruments, flags, jewelry and ships, and wore rubber hats, vests and ties.
He died in 1860, some $200,000 in debt, but royalties made his family comfortable.
In 1888, John Dunlop, an Irish veterinarian, built on Goodyear's success. Looking for a way to give his young son a smoother bicycle ride, Dunlop used a thin rubber sheet covered with fabric and tried to make air-filled tires.
He created the first pneumatic tire, applied for a patent and sold his idea to Harvey du Cross Jr., who started the Dunlop Tire Co.
Taking that idea and applying it further, in 1895 Andre Michelin was the first to use air-filled tires on a car, which had been rolling on jarring metal or wooden rings. Entering a 350-mile race that began in Paris, Michelin drove a car with rubber, air-filled tires that suffered 20 flats before it reached the Bordeaux destination.
And air-filled tires were pronounced a failure.
Others experimented by filling rubber tubes with hay, sawdust, sand and other substances, but nothing worked well.
In 1894, a New York businessman named Alexander Stauss developed a process that allowed fabric to stretch. It was a big hit with clothing makers. But 17 years later, his son Philip, treasurer of the Hardman Tire & Rubber Co., applied the process to rubber.
The first successful automobile tire was born when Hardman produced an air-filled inner tube that was surrounded by hardened rubber reinforced with fabric.
In 1903 P.W. Litchfield applied for a patent for the first tubeless tire, which incorporated the two-piece product manufactured by Hardman, but it didn't hit the market until 1954 with the Packard.
In 1904, a car called the Christie offered a tire on a mountable rim, which could be removed to repair flats.
While greatly improved, early tires still left a lot to be desired. They were smooth with no traction, and it wasn't uncommon to see ropes and rags tied around tires when roads were icy or wet.
Frank Seiberling solved this problem in 1908. Inventing a machine that cut grooves in the tire's hard surface, he was able to add traction.
In 1910, the Goodrich Co. introduced a tire with a sturdy new fabric and added carbon to reduce wear. By 1920, a tire was expected to last 13,000 miles.
World War II cut contact with rubber sources in Asia and South America, forcing tire companies to produce a petroleum-based synthetic. By 1950, half of all tires were made with man-made rubber.
Today's tires consist of 60 percent synthetics, even though there is a cultivated rubber tree for every two people on earth.
It's likely that Goodyear, the good-natured inventor who started it all, would be pleased to see where his debtor-prison experiments have led.
"Life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents," he once wrote. "I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps."
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