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Charles Goodyear Facts & Worksheets

Charles Goodyear was a self-taught American chemist and inventor who pioneered the vulcanization of rubber. It took Goodyear ten years before he made rubber that did not melt in the summer or crack in the winter.

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Charles Goodyear was a self-taught American chemist and inventor who pioneered the vulcanization of rubber. It took Goodyear ten years before he made rubber that did not melt in the summer or crack in the winter. Goodyear experienced failures and hardships throughout his journey with rubber, but his perseverance and obsession pushed him to make it useful for all of us.

See the fact file below for more information on the Charles Goodyear or alternatively, you can download our 23-page Charles Goodyear worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

GOODYEAR’S EARLY LIFE

  • Charles Goodyear was born on December 29, 1800, in New Haven, Connecticut.
  • He was the eldest of six children of Amasa and Cynthia Bateman Goodyear.
  • His ancestor, Stephen Goodyear, was one of the New Haven Colony founders in 1683. He left home for Philadelphia to study the hardware business in 1814.
  • When he returned, he entered into a business partnership with his father to manufacture ivory, metal buttons, and different agricultural supplements.
  • He got married to Clarissa Beecher on August 3, 1824. Their family moved and settled in Philadelphia in 1826. He opened a hardware store that specialized in manufacturing agricultural implements.
  • His business was doing very well after the public’s distrust of the locally produced agricultural products waned.
  • He suffered from dyspepsia in 1829. At the same time, his business failed after several business endeavors failed until he declared bankruptcy.

THE BEGINNING OF OBSESSION

  • Between 1831 and 1832, Goodyear heard about the gum elastic and studied every article in the newspapers about it. In 1834, He visited the Roxbury India Rubber Company in New York, as he believed they found a way to manufacture goods from Indian rubber.
  • Goodyear noticed that the tube in the life preservers the company produced was not effective and reliable. He made improvements on it upon returning to Philadelphia and went back to Roxbury to present his work.
  • The manager was impressed with his work but told him that the business was failing as the gum they used melted during the summer, making their products useless. Goodyear was determined to find a solution to the problem with these rubber products.
  • However, when he got home, one of his creditors had him arrested and sent him to jail. He used this setback in his life as an opportunity to experiment more on gums.

A TEN-YEAR EXPERIMENT

  • He asked his wife to bring him the materials he needed in jail. He first started to experiment by heating it and mixing it with magnesia, which resulted in a white compound and seemed to remove the stickiness.
  • Thinking that he already found the solution, he started making shoes with his wife and children’s help and used their own house to produce hundreds of rubber shoes. His friends in New Haven, confident of his discovery, invested in Goodyear’s new venture.
  • But when the summer came, the footwear began to melt in a shapeless paste-like manner.
  • As Goodyear’s experiment began to disturb his neighbors, he sold pieces of his furniture and moved his family to New York. He rented a small apartment, and a friend gave him a fourth-floor tenement bedroom that served as his laboratory.
  • His relatives, worried about his family, lectured and reminded him that rubber was dead. He insisted that he would be the one to bring it back.
  • In his laboratory, Goodyear experimented with rubber by compounding it with magnesia and boiling it with a quicklime and water mixture. It appeared to solve the stickiness problem, and a New York trade show even awarded him a medal for it.
  • Goodyear used all the rubber he had to produce samples until he ran short of materials. He recycled an old decorative piece and applied nitric acid to it to remove the bronze paint. It turned black, so Goodyear threw it out. After a few days, he remembered that the black scrap he threw had felt different. He salvaged it from the trash and found out that it was smoother and dry, which made it better than any rubber he had made before.
  • He found an investor in New York. The businessman paid several thousand dollars to start the production, but a financial panic in 1837 financially wiped out both him and the investor.
  • Penniless, Goodyear and his family moved to an abandoned rubber factory on Staten Island and lived on fish that he caught himself.
  • After some time, he found new investors from Boston. He got a contract to manufacture 150 mailbags using his rubber and nitric acid formula. He was so confident of the newly produced rubber that he stored the bags in a warm room and left them to have a vacation with his family. They returned after a month and found the mailbags had melted.
  • Now in Woburn, Massachusetts, he had hit rock bottom and had to rely on his neighbor’s generosity to feed his family. His children learned how to dig half-grown potatoes for food.
  • In February 1839, he was about to show off his new gum-and-sulfur formula when it accidentally slipped from his fingers and landed on the hot pot-bellied stove.
  • When he took it off the stove, he found that it burned like leather and not like molasses like his previous invention. He discovered that he made weatherproof rubber, or what we now know as vulcanized rubber.
  • Having this new information, he tested it over and over to find the appropriate heat needed. When he finally found the ideal temperature, he informed his wealthy brother-in-law, a wool manufacturer and the relative who lectured him about his hungry family.
  • He was interested this time, as Goodyear explained that interwoven rubber threads would produce fashionable puckered men’s shirts. The production of ruffled shirt fronts of dandies kicked off this rubber’s worldwide success. Goodyear received US patent number 1090 on February 24, 1839.
  • Goodyear wanted to make everything out of rubber. He wore rubber hats and vests and ties, had his portrait painted in rubber, and engraved his calling card in rubber. He let his brothers run his small factory in Massachusetts and sold his patents to other manufacturers.

BATTLE FOR PATENTS

  • Goodyear also sent samples, without any details, of his heat and sulfur treated rubber to British rubber companies hoping to expand his business ventures there.
  • Thomas Hancock, a famed English rubber pioneer, found one of them, experimented, and noticed the sulfur component.
  • Hancock reengineered the process and reinvented vulcanization in 1843. Hancock’s associate coined the term vulcanization, which came from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.
  • When Goodyear applied for a patent in England, he found out that Hancock had the patent for vulcanizing.
  • Goodyear filed a lawsuit against Hancock. The latter offered him half-share in his patent for Goodyear to drop the suit, which he declined.
  • If Goodyear were to win, he would have his patent accepted and therefore receive royalties from Hancock’s products. Goodyear lost the lawsuit.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT CHARLES GOODYEAR

  • Charles Goodyear died on July 1, 1860, en route to see his dying daughter. When he found out about her death, he collapsed and was taken to the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. He died at the age of 59.
  • Goodyear died with $200,000 of debt under his name. However, the accumulated royalties helped his family live comfortably.
  • He had 12 children, but six died during infancy. His son, gifted with the same talent as his father, later built a small fortune on shoemaking machinery.
  • Four decades after his death, a tire and rubber company was founded and named after Goodyear.
  • It is now a billion-dollar company named Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. However, no one in the Goodyear family is connected to the company.

Charles Goodyear Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Charles Goodyear across 23 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Charles Goodyear worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Charles Goodyear who was a self-taught American chemist and inventor who pioneered the vulcanization of rubber. It took Goodyear ten years before he made rubber that did not melt in the summer or crack in the winter. Goodyear experienced failures and hardships throughout his journey with rubber, but his perseverance and obsession pushed him to make it useful for all of us.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • Charles Goodyear Facts
  • Goodyear’s Early Life
  • Goodyear’s Realization
  • Timeline of the Inventor
  • Missing Words
  • The Goodyear Interview
  • The Journey of the Rubber
  • Failures and Hardships
  • Battle for Patent
  • What Went Wrong?
  • Made of Rubber

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Use With Any Curriculum

These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

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