Before Tires, Goodyear Bounced Around Ideas for Usable Rubber

NOBLE OBSESSION

Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century

By Charles Slack

Theia/Hyperion

304 pages, $24.95

The vulcanization of rubber was one of the great industrial discoveries of the technologically busy 19th century. By vulcanization, the gooey substance from trees was made, as Charles Slack writes in “Noble Obsession,” into “the great shock absorber of the industrial age.”

It went on to also provide insulation for electrical power, rubber belts for assembly lines, springiness for mattresses and sports balls and running shoes, elasticity for balloons and condoms, and, for automobiles, tires and all those engine belts. Half the world’s rubber now goes into tires for cars, which were not yet invented when Charles Goodyear, in 1842, perfected his great discovery.

Many of the useful properties of rubber were known by then, but the substance was maddeningly hard to use. In hot weather it got sticky and melted; in cold, it turned brittle, cracked and broke. Both tendencies were inconvenient for the shoes and coats that were already being made of rubber because it was impervious to moisture. Charles Mackintosh had already created his famous waterproof coats of rubber. Its uses had gone way beyond that which gave it its name, which was a singular ability as an eraser to rub out what a pencil had written.

Inventors and businessmen in England and America had been trying for a couple of decades to devise a process to make rubber constantly supple and insensitive to temperature changes. They added things to it, from ammonia to turpentine. Nothing worked.

Goodyear, descended from the earliest white settlers in Connecticut, was, by his own account and that of others, obsessed with finding the key to usable rubber. While he pursued his single-minded search, his growing family endured poverty and he, on several occasions, debtor’s prison. But he persisted and found the secret. He added sulfur to rubber and heated it. Heat was the thing that did the trick.

It is not in dispute that the credit for the discovery of vulcanization goes to Goodyear. But at the time, the credit was much disputed. By the vagaries of British and American patent law, a distinguished Englishman, Thomas Hancock, grabbed the British patent after he received samples of Goodyear’s work. A British judge later affirmed Hancock’s claim but acknowledged Goodyear as the true inventor.

Goodyear obtained the American patent but had to defend it against various claimants, notorious among them one Horace Day (no known relation to this reviewer), whom Slack revels in calling “dastardly.”

The liveliest section of “Noble Obsession” is the account of the 1852 contest over the patent in a New Jersey courtroom. Goodyear hired Daniel Webster to represent him and agreed to pay him, if victorious, $16,000, the highest fee, Slack says, ever earned by an American lawyer. Webster’s opponent, Day’s lawyer, was the celebrated Rufus Choate.

The newspapers of the day said Choate’s long argument was magnificent, but they reported not one word of what he said. Webster’s argument, thorough and grave, survives in all its mid-19th century eloquence. Webster won, and Goodyear finally had enough money to live on rather well, though the company that bears his name was not founded until 38 years after his death in 1860. (The term “vulcanization,” by the way, was coined by a competitor some years after Goodyear’s discovery.)The story of Goodyear and his long slog toward the attainment of his desire is an interesting one, but Slack encumbers it with needless details that, accumulated, numb the brain. Slack records every false start, every distressing setback, until the reader feels he is confined within one of Goodyear’s wretched workplaces reeking with the scent of burnt rubber. It is not until late in the book that the narrative takes flight into liveliness, as Goodyear reaches his goal and bests his enemies and most of his competitors.

Did Goodyear really discover vulcanization or was it a happy accident, a piece of sulfured rubber dropped on a hot stove, as the rumor had it? Slack is inclined toward Goodyear’s side. He quotes the inventor’s somewhat defensive third-person words: “While the inventor admits that these discoveries were not the result of scientific chemical investigations, he is not willing to admit that they were the result of what is commonly called accident; he claims them to be the result of the closest application and observation.”

“Closest application and observation” nicely sums up the particular talents of this single-minded 19th century inventor.