Goodyear: The Man whose name is on a Billion Tires Died $200,000 in Debt

His name is on a billion tires. He never made one, and he died owing nearly $200,000. Charles Goodyear was a Connecticut hardware salesman with no scientific training who had been ruined four times and jailed for debt. For five years he mixed rubber with anything he could get hold of - magnesia, quicklime, nitric acid - while his family lived on charity from local farmers and his wife Clarissa was dying of tuberculosis. In 1839, in Woburn, Massachusetts, he found it. The tire company has nothing to do with him. It was founded in Akron in 1898, thirty-eight years after his funeral, by a man named Frank Seiberling who had never met him. Seiberling needed a name, took one belonging to a dead man, and paid nothing for it - because by 1898 the word simply meant rubber, and there was no one left to ask. In 1921 Seiberling was pushed out of the company he had founded and named. Along the way: the most famous accident in American invention, which his own book suggests was not quite an accident; an Englishman who filed for the same process eight weeks before he did; the largest legal fee ever paid in America to that date, won on his behalf by Daniel Webster, and more than Goodyear ever earned from rubber himself; and two flying aircraft carriers - the only ones anybody has ever operated - built in Akron and lost at sea. Where the record is genuinely contested, this episode says so on screen instead of picking whichever version tells better. Chapters 0:00 The Stove in Woburn 3:11 The Accident That Might Not Have Been 6:11 Ruin, a Medal, and a Dead Man's Name 9:40 The Flying Aircraft Carriers Archival material Syringes with bulbs of natural rubber. Wellcome Collection. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... - CC BY 4.0 Silobanden (farm tyres) (25754549246).jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... - CC BY 2.0 - Wikimedia Commons J. & F.W. Ridgway, plumbers and hydraulic engineers, 145 Broadway, New York, 1844. Library of Congress - no known restrictions Commercial chemical laboratory of the mid 18th Century. Wellcome M0016. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... - CC BY 4.0 - Wikimedia Commons Account books. Wellcome Collection. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... - CC BY 4.0 Goodyear rubber-soled shoes, 1890s, Goodyear Rubber Manufacturing Company. Bata Shoe Museum - CC0 - Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Women assembling tyres in a rubber factory, Britain 1914-18. Imperial War Museum Q28232 via Wikimedia Commons - public domain