Goodyear, CHARLES

Goodyear, CHARLES, an American inventor, was born 29th December 1800, at New Haven, Connecticut. He failed as an iron-manufacturer in 1830, but in 1834 turned his attention to india-rubber, the manufactured products of which had hitherto proved failures because of their liability to soften in the heat of summer. Amid poverty and ridicule, sometimes in prison for debt, he patiently pursued the experiments which, after he had obtained a fresh idea from his assistant Hayward's use of sulphur, ended, in 1844, in the issue of his patent for vulcanised rubber (see INDIA-RUBBER). This process he afterwards perfected, discovering new uses to which his product could be applied, until it required sixty patents to secure his inventions. He received medals at London (1851) and Paris (1855), as well as the cross of the Legion of Honour; although kept in continual litigation and consequent poverty by shameless infringements of his rights, he yet lived 'to see his material applied to nearly five hundred uses, and to give employment, in England, France, Germany, and the United States, to 60,000 persons' (Parton). He died at New York, July 1, 1860. See Pierce, Trials of an Inventor (New York, 1866); and Parton, Famous Americans of Recent Times (Boston, 1867).