July 13, 2026 • 48 mins
Charles Goodyear's work is important to so many things we have in the 21st century. But his life and his work to create a stable rubber was full of problems -- many of them caused by Goodyear himself.
Research:
- Britannica Editors. "Charles Goodyear". Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Dec. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Goodyear
- “Charles Goodyear.” Who Made America? PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/goodyear_hi.html
- “Charles Goodyear - Vulcanization of Rubber.” National Inventors Hall of Fame. https://www.invent.org/inductees/charles-goodyear
- “Charles Goodyear - Vulcanized Rubber.” Lemelson-MIT. https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/charles-goodyear
- “Charles Goodyear and the Vulcanization of Rubber.” ConnecticutHistory.org. https://connecticuthistory.org/charles-goodyear-and-the-vulcanization-of-rubber/
- “Charles Goodyear’s Machine for Making Rubber Fabrics.” ConnecticutHistory.org. https://connecticuthistory.org/charles-goodyears-machine-for-making-rubber-fabrics/
- “Death of Charles Goodyear.” Carbondale Advantage. July 21, 1860. https://www.newspapers.com/image/638799032/?match=2&terms=%22charles%20goodyear%22
- Goodyear, Charles. “Gum-elastic and its varieties : with a detailed account of its applications and uses, and of the discovery of vulcanization.” New Haven. Published for the Author. 1853. https://archive.org/details/gumelasticitsva121853good/
- Goodyear, Charles. “IMPROVEMENT IN INDIA-RUBBER FABRICS.” United States Patent Office. June 15, 1844. https://web.archive.org/web/20150714081931/http://www.dpma.de/docs/service/klassifikationen/ipc/auto_ipc/us3633a.pdf
- “Goodyear’s Gum Elastic Drapery and Parchment.” The Washington Union. May 4, 1837. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1038143941/?match=3&terms=%22charles%20goodyear%22%20mail
- Iles, George. “Leading American Inventors.” H. Holt 1912. Accessed online: https://books.google.com/books?id=Hn0_AAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
- “India Rubber Fabric.” Daily Cleveland herald. October 10, 1835. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1073496245/?match=1&terms=%22Charles%20Goodyear%22
- Slack, Charles. “Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century.” Hyperion. 2003.
- Snow, Richard F. “Charles Goodyear.” American Heritage. April/May 1978. Vol. 29, Issue 3. https://www.americanheritage.com/charles-goodyear
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And this is not
the episode I set out to write. So funny, I
was going to do an episode on sneaker history. Listen,
(00:24):
I probably still will. I still love shoes. But one
of the things that I wanted to do in setting
up that episode was to talk about Charles Goodyear because
his work really led to the development of the sneaker industry,
because they need those souls, like that's the distinguishing characteristic
(00:46):
of sneakers. And he had come up on our episode
on raincoat History, but we didn't go very deep into
his life story, and his work is really very important
to a lot of the things that we have in
the twenty first century. It was, as I said, very
pivotal to the development of the sneaker. But in the
process of trying to give him some time for a
(01:08):
little mini biography at the front end of that episode,
I just realized he had to end up being the
whole episode. Because I was intrigued, not in always a
great way. I was also really frustrated you're going to
see you also will be frustrated with this man. Charles
Goodyear is often described as a chemist, and I guess
(01:28):
you could say that it doesn't seem quite accurate to
me because he was not the kind of chemist who
was seeking to understand molecular science. He wasn't developing formulas.
We talked about so many people in that Raincode episode
who were also trying to figure these things out, like
how to make a stable, non sticky rubber, but they
operated so differently from Goodyear because he was just kind
(01:50):
of trying stuff out, seeing what worked, sometimes having an
accident and going can I replicate that, which sometimes happens
in science. But he really was kind of just like
trying things in the lab. He was not like a
heavy science dude and spoiler A learned. I feel like
I should also tell people this is not the most
(02:11):
upbeat story. There are some great moments where Goodyear gets
really excited about his work. You too, will likely become
frustrated with him in the course of this episode because
he made a lot of really dodgy decisions, and those
decisions often caused the people that he loved a whole
lot of suffering. In the process. So that's who we're
talking about today. So Charles Goodyear was born on December
(02:37):
twenty ninth, eighteen hundred, in New Haven, Connecticut, to Amasa
Goodyear and Cynthia Bateman Goodyear. Goodyear's family traced all the
way back to the founding of the New Haven colony.
Amasa was a merchant and owned a hardware store. The
family moved north to Naugatuck, Connecticut when Charles was very young,
(02:57):
and he spent his early life there. For some portion
of his youth, Charles, who was deeply religious, considered a
life in the clergy, although he did abandon that idea.
At seventeen, he moved to Philadelphia and he lived there
for four years and he worked as an apprentice in
another hardware store, and then at the end of that
(03:18):
four years, when he returned home to Connecticut, he became
business partners with his father, and their business became a Masa,
Goodyear and Son. The early work of this career that
Charles Goodyear was doing with his father's company gave very
little indication of the invention that would make Charles famous. Eventually,
they were known for their metal goods that A Masa
(03:39):
designed and manufactured, including everything from buttons to farm equipment.
So I guess in terms of ingenuity and inventiveness, maybe
it's a hint. A nineteen twelve book titled Leading American
Inventors claims that the Good Years were known especially for
making really good forks. That cracks me up, specifically forks.
(04:01):
You want to know where to get the best? Four
can down these guys Good Years. Several years into this work,
Charles got married to a woman named Clarissa Beecher. This
appears to have been a good match and a happy marriage,
despite the two of them having to get through a
lot of difficult times. They had seven children together. Yeah,
(04:22):
and I actually should say I had written that note
that Tracy just read about the number of children, that
there were a lot of children that Goodyear had and
they didn't all live. And I actually had a hard
time kind of untangling how many he had with Clarissa.
There's also a second wife that's going to come up
(04:42):
later on. So the seven. Take it with a grain
of salt, because I'm not one hundred percent the biography
that I read that said seven. I did not untangle
how they landed at that number, but they did have
many kids together, but before they went through the tough
times that Tracy just alluded to, there was actually a
(05:03):
period of prosperity. Charles and Clarissa moved to Philadelphia in
eighteen twenty six so that Charles could start his own
hardware store, and initially they did really well, but Charles
ran into financial problems. This will set the stage for
his entire life story. He often sold things on credit,
which a lot of merchants did, but it seems like
(05:25):
he was not very good at collecting payments. He also
gave credit to people who maybe didn't really have anything
to back that up, and he soon found out that
he could not keep up with his own debts, and
the business closed in eighteen thirty. This is one of
those things that's a little bit weird because in a
lot of write ups you will see about Goodyear, they
(05:46):
describe it as his father's business failing, and that confusion
may come from the fact that much of the stock
in Charles's store had actually come from his father, so
there was a connection between the two stores, but it
was Charles's own store that collapsed. According to that same
nineteen twelve book we just mentioned, Goodyear refused to declare
(06:08):
bankruptcy because he knew it would lead to the seizure
of all of his assets, including any intellectual property, and
because he and his father had come up with a
variety of metal things, he didn't want to lose his
rights to those. And the consequence is that he apparently
was in and out of debtors prison a lot throughout
(06:28):
his whole life. I was not able to confirm this
next bit to find hard documentation, although I did find
a nineteen thirty three notice in the United States Gazette
of Philadelphia that his home was being auctioned off by
the Sheriff's office, presumably as part of a default issue
with a loan. For a while the family was really
(06:51):
scraping by Clarissa was bringing in some money looming. Linen
and Charles also notes in his own writing that there
was a time during this period when their possessions were
sold at auction to meet their rental costs, and this
is something that would happen throughout his life. Goodyear later
(07:11):
explained how he came to view rubber as a potential
way out of his financial problems. He described in writing
how he visited the Roxbury, India Rubber Company in New
York to purchase a life preserver, but when he examined it,
he thought the rubber tube that was used to inflate
it could be improved. So he went home and he
(07:32):
worked on a new tube, and then he brought that
to the showroom. The person he spoke with thought that
the new tube was indeed an improvement, and that Goodyear
might be able to solve another bigger problem. He told
Goodyear that he should work on improving India rubber, and
that if he could, he would make a lot of money.
He also mentioned that a lot of other people had
(07:54):
tried and failed and lost a lot of money in
the process, and Goodyear later wrote of this moment when
he had this conversation in the third person, stating quote,
he was not before aware that the manufacturer was so
imperfectly understood. He was blessed with ignorance of the obstacles
(08:14):
which he had subsequently to encounter, but soon learned this much,
at least, that the difficulties which attended experiments with the substance,
if not unparalleled, were of an uncommon character. From the
fact that the experimenter as well as the manufacturer, was
obliged to wait the return of both warm and cold
weather at least twelve months and often longer before he
(08:36):
could know with any certainty that his articles would not
decompose or what were the results of his labors. So, yes,
there was this huge opportunity to turn his finances around,
but it was also going to require a significant investment
of time before any benefit would even be possible. But
(08:57):
Charles Goodyear also realized that quote that which which is
hidden and unknown and cannot be discovered by scientific research,
will most likely be discovered by accident, if at all,
and by the man who applies himself most perseveringly to
the subject and is most observing of everything relating there too.
Basically like, okay, science people can't do it, but I'm
(09:19):
just gonna keep trying. So he took on this challenge,
and the biggest initial challenge with India rubber was heat.
So natural rubber, which was called India rubber, had a
lot of problems and practical applications, like indigenous people who
live in places where these plants grow have been using
natural rubber for millennia, but when we're talking about like
(09:42):
manufactured products, there were issues. It could waterproof things, but
it also melted when it got hot, and it would
stick to other things, potentially making a huge mess. When
it melted, it would lose its shape and it didn't
snap back, and environments that were hotter than one hundred
degrees fahrenheit, rubber quickly broke down completely. And it also
(10:05):
cracked in the cold, So something that was coated with
it for waterproofing would no longer be waterproof if it
got too cold. Problems with snowboots, for example, have cracked
rubber and wet feet. So if you had something coated
in India rubber, it had to have this ongoing upkeep
(10:26):
and re application to try to retain the benefits of
the rubber coating. Yeah, and as Tracy said, indigenous people
used it, but they kind of understood this and it
was part of their annual cycles to maintain their stuff
with it. Whereas to make things for manufacture, nobody wanted
to buy into a thing that you can not be
reach what a consumer product is about. We are going
(10:50):
to talk about what Charles Goodyear did right in his
early years of experimenting. After we paused for a sponsor break.
The start of Goodyear's success with rubber was in eighteen
thirty five, when he figured out how to manufacture gum
(11:13):
elastic that's just another name for natural rubber India rubber
into sheets. He added magnesium to gum rubber at a
one to one ratio, then added turpentine to liquefy it,
and then he spread that out onto marble with a
rolling pin. One account said he borrowed his wife's rolling
pin for the first batch. I don't know if that's true. Then,
(11:34):
according to his own account, he quote also commenced the
art of embossing on glazed cambrics, and he used these
sheets of rubber fabric to start making shoes, and these
were to be used for testing. These were not shoes
that were going right to consumers. And that's good because they,
like other rubber products, melted and stuck together in warm temperatures.
(11:57):
He eventually arrived at quote boiling. The article compounded with
magnesia in quicklime and water, which appeared to have the
effect of tanning the gum and destroying its viscous property.
So he thought he had managed to solve that melting problem.
By the end of eighteen thirty five, newspapers ran this
(12:17):
story quote, A discovery has been recently made by mister
Charles Goodyear, by which indiear rubber, after having been dissolved,
can be restored by a cheap process to its original whiteness,
and the pure gum be formed into a fabric that
can be used instead of cloth, leather, or parchment, and
can be molded into almost any form, and can also
(12:40):
be combined in a variety of ways with cloth, cordage,
and leather. Good Year won metals from the Mechanics Institute
and the American Institute that year for his rubber sheets.
But if those sheets were washed with anything acidic, like
even if someone put a little lemon juice in water
to wipe them down, the lime in them was neutralized
(13:02):
and they became sticky again. So in eighteen thirty six
he was back at work trying to figure out improvements,
and the solution was a little bit of an accident.
He had tried a number of things which were not working,
and then one day he boiled a piece of his
rubber fabric in lime with liquid bronze like the metal bronze,
(13:23):
and he was trying to coat this thing, but it
didn't coat the entire fabric in metal as he had hoped.
Some of it stuck, but some of it had just
slid off, and so then he tried to get the
bronze that had it here to the fabric off using
nitric acid, but that just made this ugly mess. There
was discoloration, and he threw that sample out, thinking that
(13:45):
whole plan was trashed. But then a few days later
he pulled it out of the garbage and examined it,
and he found that while it was still pliant in
the areas where he had used nitric acid, it wasn't
sticky at all. He recreated this accidental treatment with good results,
and then he developed a process for it, which he
called the acid gas process, and he patented his new
(14:08):
rubber sheets that were made this way. He also designed
a number of products using the sheets, and he was
soon manufacturing those things thanks to a friend, William Ballard,
who was willing to invest in Charles Goodyear. Feel like
he's the first of many friends who foolishly invested in
Charles Goods. Here In fact, all of his work had
(14:29):
been possible due to Goodyear's friends being really generous with him,
from loaning him workspace to actually giving him money. And
it soured some of those friendships as Goodyear worked through
multiple expensive failures, but Goodyear and Ballard also failed, and
this time it was by no fault of Goodyear. Ballard
(14:51):
ran into his own financial hardships in the events that
led up to the Panic of eighteen thirty seven, and
he declared bankruptcy the company folded. Through all of his
ups and downs, Goodyear remained fairly upbeat, and he even
made fun of himself. He included an anecdote in his
writing about the development of rubber that he wrote decades
(15:13):
later about how he was always wearing things that were
made from rubber sheeting. These were often made by his wife, Clarissa.
This was in part to show what it could do,
and also because they didn't have other things to make
clothes out of. And when someone asked one of his
friends how he would recognize Charles Goodyear if he met him,
the reply was, quote, if you meet a man who
(15:33):
has on an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and
shoes with an India rubber money purse without a cent
of money in it, that is he. Goodyear continued on
his own making rubber shoes and housewares as almost the
cottage industry, but he wasn't able to sell much. One
of the problems was that rubber had developed a bad reputation,
(15:56):
as Goodyear and other innovators had put rubber items to
market in eighteen thirty five and eighteen thirty six. A
rubber craze had driven a lot of people to purchase
rubberized items, only to discover that those items had problems,
So people were not as keen to buy stuff made
out of rubber, and retailers were also not that interested
(16:17):
in stocking rubber products honestly understandably, Goodyear regrouped, moved the
family back to New Haven, Connecticut, where they lived with
his parents, and he focused exclusively on waterproof shoes, and
he actually did okay for a while. He wasn't flush
with cash, but he was able to support his family.
(16:39):
Goodyear also met another man who worked in rubber named
Nathaniel Hayward during this period, and Hayward had figured out
a method of combining India rubber with sulfur and curing
it in the sun, and the result was a non
sticky rubber. Goodyear purchased Hayward's patent in eighteen thirty nine,
and he also hired Hayward to work with him Hayward
(17:00):
became his assistant. The sulfur treated rubber had the complete
nonstick finish that goodyear was after, but it came with
other problems. He started making all kinds of things with
this sun cured sulfur method, and he got a massive
and important order when the US Postal Service commissioned him
to make mail bags. And he made those bags and
(17:22):
he turned out really, really well. He had treated them
with chrome, lead and vermilion to make a faux leather finish.
This was something he was experimenting with a lot at
the time, and in his writing he stated quote being
desirous to beautify the fabrics with a variety of colors.
The writer used metallic and other colors indiscriminately for this purpose.
(17:44):
He treated the mail bags and then he hung them
in his workshop while he went away on vacation, And
when he got home, those bags were in piles on
the floor. The material was breaking down, and it also
smelled horrible. The rubber was rotting. He had not just
been making the mail bags this way. He'd also made
home goods and life preservers, and they had been selling.
(18:07):
And he had also been crowing to all of his
friends about his big government contract, and now people's stuff
was falling apart. He had a lot of angry consumers
and no mail bags to deliver on that contract. He wrote,
quote again, he saw those dear to him, together with
his aged parents, stripped of the comforts with which they
(18:28):
were surrounded. Everything that he possessed was brought to the
hammer for the discharge of private bills. Goodyear described this
as a time of serious misfortune in his life. He
was completely broke. He knew that he had alienated people,
describing himself as quote being justly debarred the sympathy of others.
(18:49):
A lot of people told him that he should give
up on rubber and go back to the hardware business.
She did not do that. Instead, he tried to figure
out exactly what had gone wrong with the process, and
he believed it was the colorants. His process had been
working perfectly on sheets of rubber, but these mail bags
and other new products that had failed were thicker, and
(19:11):
it seemed that the sun curing process just couldn't reach
the deeper layers of thicker items, so they weren't curing
all the way through. But though this whole ordeal would
probably destroy most people and he did seem to have
been in a downward spiral briefly, she bounced back kind
of quickly when something else caught his attention. He wrote
(19:31):
that he quote had hardly time enough to realize the
extent of his embarrassment before he became intently engaged with
another experiment and his mind buoyant with new hopes and expectations, which,
as it afterwards proved, were to be for the time
at least more than realized. In our episode about the
invention of the raincoat, we mentioned that it's often said
(19:54):
that the discovery of vulcanization was kind of an accident,
and that's true, although not in quite the way that
we said In that episode, that was sort of a
brief mention. It didn't get the kind of deeper dive
that today's episode is getting. So we know now how
things played out, at least according to Goodyear's account. He
stated that he was visiting a factory in Wourren and
(20:18):
he brought a sample of some of the compound that
had failed in the mailbags. According to him, the sample quote,
being carelessly brought in contact with a hot stove charred
like leather, so it didn't melt Goodyear described calling out
to his brother and some of the other people around
to point out how interesting this was, but it sounds
(20:39):
like they had kind of had enough of him getting
excited about things and then having them fall apart, so
nobody really paid much attention. But Goodyear really felt like
he had identified something important. His accident made him believe
that high temperature applied to a treated piece of rubber
cloth could potentially remove all of its stickiness if he
(21:01):
could just get the temperature and the exposure to it right.
So he started a series of experiments. He found that
if he heated sulfur to boiling, which is like hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of degrees that you have to reach,
he could put India rubber in it and the rubber
would not melt and it would emerge intact, soft and pliable.
(21:24):
He also tried exposing treated fabric to fire and found
that it did not melt, but it charred as it
had done it in his accident at the factory. Once
he had proof of concept, he was all in on
his new process, and he spent several months testing it.
He tested a variety of different heat sources, and as
he refined he ran processes over and over to ensure
(21:46):
the results were consistent. The rubber he produced did not
break down in high temperatures, and as for cold One
of his daughters described seeing him nail a piece of
his treated rubber outside one evening before a cold night,
and then retrieved it in the morning, and he was
elated to find that it was still flexible and it
had not cracked, so he had figured out vulcanization. He
(22:10):
also gave the process that name after the Roman god
of fire. So at this point, after all of that,
this was a thoroughly tested process that addressed the problems
that everybody was having with the production of rubber, and
it addressed all of the problems that Goodyear had had
with his own mail bags and other products. But just
as his brother and colleagues had really not wanted to
(22:32):
hear it when Charles noticed his sample not melting in
that earlier incident, the consumer market was really not interested
in vulcanized rubber. In addition to the problems with reliability
of rubber products in general, Goodyear's failures were well known.
On top of those two problems, the idea of home
(22:55):
wayer Goods was seen as a novelty. He needed to
produce something bigger if he was going to really get
a large scale buy in from a company or a
government contract. And then there was the really big obstacle.
All of the items he had vulcanized were processed in
very small setups in Goodyear's home or in workshops where
he was borrowing time. He just couldn't produce anything at
(23:19):
scale to show that he had really figured things out
this time. The rest of Goodyear's life was like an
unending roller coaster ride, and not in a good way.
We'll get into it after we hear from the sponsors.
They keep the show going. During this time in Charles
(23:45):
Goodyear's life, when he was perfecting vulcanization, his family was
really struggling. In the winter of eighteen thirty nine to
eighteen forty, there was a very heavy snowstorm and the
Goodyears were trapped in their home with no fuel to
war and no food to eat. And remember he had
quite a few kids. Charles said that he was sick,
(24:07):
but that he walked through the storm to the house
of a man named Obie Coolidge looking for help. This
was a person who's kind of like a neighbor. They
had said high on the street once or twice, but
they didn't really know each other, and according to Goodyear,
he explained to Coolidge the situation he was in, including
the work he had been doing in the previous years,
and Coolidge not only gave him help with the family's
(24:29):
immediate needs to get them warmed and fed, he also
backed Goodyear financially for continued work, giving him additional funds
to sustain his efforts. Goodyear was working at the time
to create what he described as quote a set of
military equipments for specimens, with the intention of vulcanizing them
(24:51):
as soon as an apparatus could be obtained for the purpose.
But once again his luck tanked because before he could
vulcanize these items, the rubber fermented and they fell apart.
He had lost an entire winter's worth of work. He
talked the experience up to a learning opportunity, recognizing that
he could not mix natural rubber with a solvent and
(25:14):
then compound it with lead and sulfur unless he was
ready to vulcanize that right away. Finally, there was a
potential breakthrough, but it wasn't in the way that Goodyear anticipated.
He was approached by a French firm called Ratier in
Gibas to license his acid gas process, but he didn't
(25:34):
want to give it to them because he felt like
he was so close to large scale vulcanization and that
it would be a far better process for them to license.
This is really frustrating to read about because he continued
to put his family in peril by saying no, no,
just wait a little longer. When his two year old
son was dangerously ill because he had not taken this contract,
(25:58):
Goodyear wrote to a friend for hell and he got
back seven dollars and a letter chastising him for not
taking some sort of stable work to support his family.
With money borrowed from relatives, Goodyear took some of his
small home vulcanized items to New York and then once
again got funding, this time from a man named William Ryder.
(26:21):
This enabled Goodyear to set up a large scale facility
in Springfield, Massachusetts, and he started to gain some momentum.
He started getting orders for goods and he was getting
the business in decent shape when he got hit with
another bit of bad fortune. He landed in debtors jail again.
He was thirty five thousand dollars in the hull, and
(26:41):
people were filing claims against him, but this time he
took the option of declaring bankruptcy to get out of
that situation. Even so, once he was free from prison,
he continued to work until the debts he had were
all paid off. Shockingly, that only took a few months.
Yeah that French company and others did start to get
(27:02):
licensed deals with him, and that helped him really get
to a much more stable financial footing for a while.
The eighteen forties started with great promise, although Goodyear was
not entirely satisfied with the vulcanization process when it came
to fabric, which was really one of the big applications
of it. And the problem was that the fabrics that
Goodyear was adhering his vulcanized rubber to just didn't always
(27:25):
stay at here. He tried a lot of different kinds
of fabrics and they all had this problem. He spent
a lot of time year solving this problem, and it
ultimately saw Goodyear abandoning this idea of adhering the rubber
to fabric and instead directly mixing cotton fibers into his
India rubber in its liquid form. Before he'd laid it
(27:46):
out flat and vulcanized it, and this basically created an
entirely new fabric. Additionally, Goodyear did not really want to
run a factory. He was intent on licenses serving as
his income. But it took kind of a weird path
to try to get there, because he kept inventing uses
for vulcanized rubber and then building prototypes not to put
(28:09):
these items into production, just to show that this could
be done. This was a very expensive way to do business,
and he had taken so much time trying to perfect
things that other chemists were now able to develop their
own processes before he finally got a patent for vulcanization
in eighteen forty four. That led to legal issues down
(28:30):
the road. Yeah, we will talk about another patent holder
in just a moment. His next goal was to showcase
his inventions at world expositions. He spent years preparing to
exhibit at the eighteen fifty one Great Exhibition in London,
where he showed off vulcanization at frequent flyer on our
show The Crystal Palace. He won a medal for his efforts.
(28:51):
People really did recognize he had figured out a pretty
cool thing. But even as he was still celebrating his triumph,
he found himself in broiled in one legal battle after another.
In eighteen fifty two, he sued Horace Day for patent infringement,
and he actually hired Daniel Webster to represent him. That
was apparently very expensive. I saw one thing that claimed
(29:13):
that he paid Daniel Webster ten thousand dollars for that.
In eighteen fifty one, he did win the suit, and
he celebrated by taking the entire family to Europe. There
was some business in hand on that trip. Charles McIntosh,
the inventor of the raincoat, had a business partner named
Thomas Hancock. Hancock had patented his method for vulcanization, which
(29:37):
also used sulfur in Britain, at the same time that
Goodyear was getting his patent. Goodyear, no doubt, feeling confident
after the whole Horace Day verdict, intended to sue on
the grounds that Hancock had copied him. McIntosh, undoubtedly wanting
to keep his company out of any kind of legal mess,
tried to smooth things over and offered to give Goodyear
(29:59):
one half of the patent that Hancock held if Charles
would just drop his legal action. Goodyear refused, and later
he must have regretted this because he lost his case.
He could have had half of the British rights, but
then he returned home with nothing other than a big
legal bill. Yeah, there are many versions of the good
(30:22):
Year story that kind of tell his life story in
parallel to Hancock. And there is the possibility that Hancock
had gotten there's like an apocryphal story that he got
a piece of rubber that Goodyear had worked on and
he smelled sulfur on it and that led him to
his version. But we don't know that for sure. But
Goodyear made one bad decision after another, including going no, no,
(30:46):
I don't need all the money that you're gonna make.
That's fine, I'll make it all. And he didn't make
any The bad luck also continued. Clarissa Goodyear's wife of
almost thirty years at that point, died in March of
eighteen fifty three. He did remarry a year later to
a woman from London named Fanny Wardell. In the months
(31:06):
after Clarissa's death, Goodyear wrote and published his own account
of his life and work, titled gum Elastic and Its Varieties,
with a detailed account of its applications and uses, and
of the discovery of vulcanization. This book definitely reads as
though one of its goals is to establish Goodyear as
the inventor of vulcanized rubber. He opens the book, which
(31:29):
is more than five hundred pages long, with quote. The
writer finds himself so identified with the subject that he
deems it impossible to give a correct history of the
recent inventions in gum elastic without alluding to himself oftener
than he could wish by speaking of the trials and
discouragements which he had to encounter during the first seven
(31:51):
years of his experiments. In this writing, Goodyear goes right
to the basics. He talks about the Ficus elastica and
the West world's access to it. That's the tree that
it comes from, noting that while it grows in numerous regions,
its accessibility and cheaper cost in India at the time
resulted in most of it being sourced from there. And
(32:13):
he describes the process of getting the milky rubbery kouchuk
from the plant and processing it for use in various
forms that happened from the seventeen hundreds on. He compares
it and its uses to other substances like bitumen and
gud apercha. He walks the reader through the problems of
early rubber, which he calls gum or gum elastic. Quote.
(32:36):
In the early attempts to manufacture the gum in the
United States, it was found that no kind except that
which had been cured could be manufactured in any way
into goods that would not in a very short time decompose.
He noted that the way India prepped it for export
was part of the problem, and he hoped that they
would shift their methods as the global rubber industry grew
(32:59):
and more countries started making their own rubber supply available.
He also recognizes in this writing that, due to his
own advancements as well as those of others, the applications
that were making use of rubber were rapidly expanding. He
wrote about this in a way which evidences a racist
bias as well. He wrote, quote, the certainty that there
(33:20):
will in future be a very great consumption of the
various kinds of India rubber and waterproof gums has caused
a good deal of apprehension with many as to the supply,
and it is asked, where is it to come from?
Will there not be a scarcity. It is true that,
owing to the sudden and rapid extension of the manufacture,
together with some commercial speculation in the article, the price
(33:43):
has for the present year eighteen fifty one been unusually high.
So he started writing this couple years before it came out, apparently,
but this is a state of things which will not continue.
The supply is literally inexhaustible. There is a belt of
forest trees extending ten degrees each side of the equator
around the globe, which yield these gums of various kinds,
(34:06):
and has been the case with turpentine and resin the
greater the demand, the cheaper. In all probability, these substances
will be when once the attention of mankind is turned
to the subject, and that which is already being done
enterprising civilized races engage in the business of collecting it,
instead of relying on one tribe of Indians on a
(34:26):
single river, there will no longer be any solicitude on
the score of supply. The year after his second wedding,
Goodyear was back in Europe for another world's fair, the
Exposition Universal of Paris of eighteen fifty five. He spent
a lot of money on this effort, and reported fifty
thousand dollars. He spent so much money over the course
(34:49):
of the fair. While he was in France, he once
ran into money issues and ended up in a French
debtors prison. It sometimes reported that he received the French
legion of Hotter Metal while in prison, but Holly could
not find him in the legion of Honor registry Nope.
Once he was released from Debtors prison in France, Goodyear,
(35:10):
who had a long history of dyspepsia, was quite sick.
He's often described as having a variety of ailments, but
what they are is a little bit unclear. But he
was sick enough at this point that he thought he
was dying, and he actually sent letters to his friends
and family saying so and basically telling them goodbye. He
and Fanny traveled from France to Bath, England, and he
(35:33):
stayed there until eighteen fifty eight, so several years, as
his wife took care of him. He returned to the
US in May eighteen fifty eight, having pawned his wife's
jewelry to pay for that voyage. His business was a mess,
but he was able to get his patent extended for
seven years and that offered a fairly decent income. Goodyear
(35:56):
used the money he was bringing in to set up
a new home in Washington, d c. In eighteen sixty,
he learned that his daughter Cynthia was dying in Connecticut,
and he immediately set off by steamer to see her,
leaving Fanny and their five day old new daughter at home.
When this ship docked in New York, Goodyear was exhausted
(36:16):
from days of seasickness, and he was also met with
the news that Cynthia had already died. Goodyear was so
stricken that he could not continue on to Connecticut, and
he was taken to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Fanny hurried
to meet him there after being notified that he was
on his deathbed. He lived for several weeks after this
(36:37):
and died on July first, at the age of fifty nine.
Goodyear unsurprisingly left a massive debt behind, totaling right around
two hundred thousand dollars. His son, Charles Junior, much better
with money than his father, settled his outstanding debts and
using the remaining money due through patent licensing, was able
(36:58):
to set up a fund to take care of Goodyear's
remaining dependent family. When the patents expired in eighteen sixty five,
Charles Junior sold the rights to the Goodyear name. Charles
Goodyear's life was so full of ups and downs, and
he was obviously a driven man and even a visionary
of sorts, but the task of managing businesses related to
(37:21):
his ideas was something he never got the hang of.
He wrote of the hardship of being an inventor in
this way quote he takes the precaution to procure letters
patent for his invention, which he counts as property, but
which amounts chiefly to this that the government grants him
permission to fight his own battles. Next comes the herculean
(37:43):
task of convincing the public of the advantages of the improvement,
and yet the more difficult one of supplying the market
with the improvement himself, and of preventing others from doing
it by encroaching on his patent. If his object is
to derived I have a prophet by disposing of his
patents for his inventions. It is well known that patents
(38:05):
are so commonly evaded in some way, and that the
patent law is so ineffectual for their protection, that the
public will not value them highly, if at all. Incidentally,
if you're thinking, yeah, but there's a Goodyear company that
still exists today that was not started by Charles Goodyear
or any of his descendants, although the name is inspired
(38:28):
by his work. That company was founded in eighteen ninety eight,
so almost forty years after Charles Goodyear died by a
man named Frank Sieberling. Okay. Did not know that me
either until I was working on this. Do you have
some listener mail? I do. I have so many thoughts
(38:48):
about Charles Goodyear. Can't wait for Friday. I have a
listener mail from Teresa or Teresa who writes, Hello, ladies.
I just finished your episode on the UFITZI Gallery and
it had everything international travel, well art, history, restoration. Michael
Kiboman quotes labor protests. What prompted me to write was
the date of the event. An event that happened in
my own lifetime always makes me feel old, sure, but
(39:11):
also brings me back to some questions I liked discussing
with my high school students when I used to teach
the history unit for a class called Theory of Knowledge.
When does an event become history versus current events? What
is worth preserving, whether physically or through story. Is the
passage of time helpful or detrimental for creating a more
accurate understanding of the past. Theory of knowledge is a
(39:35):
required course for kids in the International Baccalaureate Program IB
for short, and for a student in IB to write
a history essay, they are required to write on something
at least ten years in the past. The election of
twenty sixteen could now be considered history, as if the
nineteen nineties being history isn't weird enough. I would love
to hear your discussion on this. I no longer teach,
(39:56):
but work in education policy, trying to make teaching better
for teas teachers. I appreciate every single time you give
a shout out to the teachers on your show. This
episode had that too. I'll do it again. Thank you educators.
Since I've included pet tax in previous emails and I
know you like art. Attached are some of my artworks
featuring my pets, Raku, the Great Pyrenees border Collie mix,
(40:18):
Ruby the super mutt are in the paper cutout Christmas card,
and Treyla, the very cute but often evil eldercat in
the form of a felted toy partially made with her
actual fur. Thank you for all your work and amazing
stories you share with us every week. I love this
email because it brings up a thing that we talk
about on the show sometimes. Yeah, but we haven't in
(40:39):
a minute, and I think it's worth looking at. We
don't have a hard rule. We have ruleish kind of like,
usually we don't do stuff that's like after I don't know, sixties,
seventies usually, Yeah. Occasionally we've done something that's been more
into the eighties, usually something that was not such big
(41:01):
news in the eighties that are listeners of a comparable
age to us would have huge memories of it. So
the bombing part of the UFC episode was like more
recent than we typically talk about. Yeah. And the logic
for me of that, and what often happens in anything
(41:21):
that we end up talking about that is more like
eighties or in this case nineties, is that it ties
to something much older. Yeah. And so for me, I
talked about at the beginning of that episode that what
got me was that picture of the or not that
picture that that impression left by a window that they
leave in one of the vaulted ceilings in the ufize,
but it really like what got me really excited was
(41:44):
looking at how they're trying to preserve history that was lost, right,
And so that gave us an opportunity to talk about art,
which I always wanted to do, and Bartolomeo Manfredi and
like a little Caravaggio in there, which is also something
I love talking about. So it's kind of like a
through line that brings us to that moment in the nineties,
which is very pivotal to the story and that you know,
(42:07):
I try to give as much information as possible within
the confines of our show, right, but it has to
connect usually to something that happened much earlier than that
for us to walk you through those decades. Yeah, there's
not a like, there's not a hard and fast rule
of when something becomes history. I'm a big fan of
(42:28):
the ask Historians subreddit, which is one of the best
moderated communities on Reddit. If you're like, ah, I read it.
They their mobs are on top of it, and they
have rules about what is appropriate to both post and comment.
And if I'm remembering correctly, their rule is a twenty
(42:49):
year rule, because that is sort of what they have
come to feel like is an appropriate amount, Like you
have enough remove from the thing happening after twenty years
to look back on it, and you could make arguments
for amounts of time longer or shorter than that, but
that's sort of where they have arrived. And that has
also meant that when a twentieth anniversary of big big
(43:12):
things are coming up, they have to kind of like
brace for all of the questions about that thing that
are likely to happen. Yeah. So yeah, I mean we
take it on a case by case basis, and there
are times where we'll check in with each other and go,
this is going to get into recent stuff. Do you
think that's okay, just as like a gut check. Right.
(43:32):
I have also heard I feel like I had a
professor in college who said that their rule of thumb
is its history. If it's the previous generations thing, like
you may have lived through part of it, but like
if it was really a thing that impacted your parents,
it's you could consider that history. And that's the thing.
There's no rule, not just for us, but I don't
(43:54):
think anywhere you can't you can make guidelines. Right. We
talked about it a little bit in the when we
did the episodes about the Vietnam draft board raids. When
we started working on this episode, I are not this
episode this podcast. When we joined as hosts, the Vietnam
(44:16):
War felt too recent to me, But that was now
more than ten years ago, and we are farther from
that now, so that felt less less too recent for me.
I have other reasons. Yeah, we're getting close to fifteen
years ago. Yeah, that's true a long time. I think
(44:39):
we're at thirteen right now, at least from when I
when I came on. Oh yeah, he came on a
little earlier than me, so yeah. Yeah. The other thing
that you asked about in your email about like do
we get more clarity or less the farther things go back.
(45:00):
This is something that like the show I used to
work on, Criminalia, was kind of entirely based on this,
Like if we look at crimes, historical true crime from
the past through a modern lens with more research, like,
are any of these criminals and villains actually kind of misunderstood?
Which is often the case, right, A lot of women
(45:21):
that were vilified throughout history. It's like, no, that's not
what's going on here. I mean, we had cases on
that show of women who were considered witches and it
turned out really they were dealing with, you know, some
kind of mental illness or even a physical infirmity that
made them other that they got you know, ostracized, or
(45:42):
like there were people that when you look at the
bigger picture, you understand, oh, they've kind of been the
victim of bad press throughout history because one person told
their story and that's what got repeated. We see that
all the time on this show as well. And so
that is another thing that's case by case. Right, Sometimes
you have better perspective from a distance, but you also
(46:05):
lose clarity in terms of like being able to say
with certainty what certain details were. This came up on
your Elizabeth Blackwell something so that you researched where it's
like people thought she was born at one point and
she was this Elizabeth, but really she's actually a different
Elizabeth than We only recently figured that out, yep. And
(46:26):
I say we meaning historians, Tracy and I did not
figure that out. She referenced the history who we cited
in the episode. But so that too is a little
bit case by case. I think there are sometimes where
you get a treasure trove of information kind of dropped
that nobody knew throughout history and only came to light
because modern you know, living technology, records access enabled somebody
(46:51):
to find it. And other times it gets farther, it
gets more and more lost, right, I mean. Thomas Harriet's
another one. We didn't know he was the first person
to look at the moon through a telescope because he
didn't publish about it. They found his notes in the
trash four hundred years later they get in a midden
heap on his family's property, so we don't know. Yeah,
(47:12):
we always love those surprises. That's why Onearthed is so popular.
I think it did shifts everybody's gears about what they think.
It's going to be. Time to work on that soon,
I know. Anyway, that's the long answer to you, and
I hope it was illuminating and not overwhelming. If you
would like to write to us and ask us a question,
(47:32):
or share pictures of art, animals, whatever, also thank you
for the art. We always love it. Listen, we love
a little felted activity that's made of cat for You
can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
If you want to see the show notes and the
resources that we used to put together an episode. You
can do that at mistinhistory dot com. If you would
(47:55):
like to subscribe to the show and you haven't gotten
to that yet, easypsy race and Cheesy, you could do
it on the eye Heart Radio app, or anywhere you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(48:18):
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And this is not
the episode I set out to write. So funny, I
was going to do an episode on sneaker history. Listen,
(00:24):
I probably still will. I still love shoes. But one
of the things that I wanted to do in setting
up that episode was to talk about Charles Goodyear because
his work really led to the development of the sneaker industry,
because they need those souls, like that's the distinguishing characteristic
(00:46):
of sneakers. And he had come up on our episode
on raincoat History, but we didn't go very deep into
his life story, and his work is really very important
to a lot of the things that we have in
the twenty first century. It was, as I said, very
pivotal to the development of the sneaker. But in the
process of trying to give him some time for a
(01:08):
little mini biography at the front end of that episode,
I just realized he had to end up being the
whole episode. Because I was intrigued, not in always a
great way. I was also really frustrated you're going to
see you also will be frustrated with this man. Charles
Goodyear is often described as a chemist, and I guess
(01:28):
you could say that it doesn't seem quite accurate to
me because he was not the kind of chemist who
was seeking to understand molecular science. He wasn't developing formulas.
We talked about so many people in that Raincode episode
who were also trying to figure these things out, like
how to make a stable, non sticky rubber, but they
operated so differently from Goodyear because he was just kind
(01:50):
of trying stuff out, seeing what worked, sometimes having an
accident and going can I replicate that, which sometimes happens
in science. But he really was kind of just like
trying things in the lab. He was not like a
heavy science dude and spoiler A learned. I feel like
I should also tell people this is not the most
(02:11):
upbeat story. There are some great moments where Goodyear gets
really excited about his work. You too, will likely become
frustrated with him in the course of this episode because
he made a lot of really dodgy decisions, and those
decisions often caused the people that he loved a whole
lot of suffering. In the process. So that's who we're
talking about today. So Charles Goodyear was born on December
(02:37):
twenty ninth, eighteen hundred, in New Haven, Connecticut, to Amasa
Goodyear and Cynthia Bateman Goodyear. Goodyear's family traced all the
way back to the founding of the New Haven colony.
Amasa was a merchant and owned a hardware store. The
family moved north to Naugatuck, Connecticut when Charles was very young,
(02:57):
and he spent his early life there. For some portion
of his youth, Charles, who was deeply religious, considered a
life in the clergy, although he did abandon that idea.
At seventeen, he moved to Philadelphia and he lived there
for four years and he worked as an apprentice in
another hardware store, and then at the end of that
(03:18):
four years, when he returned home to Connecticut, he became
business partners with his father, and their business became a Masa,
Goodyear and Son. The early work of this career that
Charles Goodyear was doing with his father's company gave very
little indication of the invention that would make Charles famous. Eventually,
they were known for their metal goods that A Masa
(03:39):
designed and manufactured, including everything from buttons to farm equipment.
So I guess in terms of ingenuity and inventiveness, maybe
it's a hint. A nineteen twelve book titled Leading American
Inventors claims that the Good Years were known especially for
making really good forks. That cracks me up, specifically forks.
(04:01):
You want to know where to get the best? Four
can down these guys Good Years. Several years into this work,
Charles got married to a woman named Clarissa Beecher. This
appears to have been a good match and a happy marriage,
despite the two of them having to get through a
lot of difficult times. They had seven children together. Yeah,
(04:22):
and I actually should say I had written that note
that Tracy just read about the number of children, that
there were a lot of children that Goodyear had and
they didn't all live. And I actually had a hard
time kind of untangling how many he had with Clarissa.
There's also a second wife that's going to come up
(04:42):
later on. So the seven. Take it with a grain
of salt, because I'm not one hundred percent the biography
that I read that said seven. I did not untangle
how they landed at that number, but they did have
many kids together, but before they went through the tough
times that Tracy just alluded to, there was actually a
(05:03):
period of prosperity. Charles and Clarissa moved to Philadelphia in
eighteen twenty six so that Charles could start his own
hardware store, and initially they did really well, but Charles
ran into financial problems. This will set the stage for
his entire life story. He often sold things on credit,
which a lot of merchants did, but it seems like
(05:25):
he was not very good at collecting payments. He also
gave credit to people who maybe didn't really have anything
to back that up, and he soon found out that
he could not keep up with his own debts, and
the business closed in eighteen thirty. This is one of
those things that's a little bit weird because in a
lot of write ups you will see about Goodyear, they
(05:46):
describe it as his father's business failing, and that confusion
may come from the fact that much of the stock
in Charles's store had actually come from his father, so
there was a connection between the two stores, but it
was Charles's own store that collapsed. According to that same
nineteen twelve book we just mentioned, Goodyear refused to declare
(06:08):
bankruptcy because he knew it would lead to the seizure
of all of his assets, including any intellectual property, and
because he and his father had come up with a
variety of metal things, he didn't want to lose his
rights to those. And the consequence is that he apparently
was in and out of debtors prison a lot throughout
(06:28):
his whole life. I was not able to confirm this
next bit to find hard documentation, although I did find
a nineteen thirty three notice in the United States Gazette
of Philadelphia that his home was being auctioned off by
the Sheriff's office, presumably as part of a default issue
with a loan. For a while the family was really
(06:51):
scraping by Clarissa was bringing in some money looming. Linen
and Charles also notes in his own writing that there
was a time during this period when their possessions were
sold at auction to meet their rental costs, and this
is something that would happen throughout his life. Goodyear later
(07:11):
explained how he came to view rubber as a potential
way out of his financial problems. He described in writing
how he visited the Roxbury, India Rubber Company in New
York to purchase a life preserver, but when he examined it,
he thought the rubber tube that was used to inflate
it could be improved. So he went home and he
(07:32):
worked on a new tube, and then he brought that
to the showroom. The person he spoke with thought that
the new tube was indeed an improvement, and that Goodyear
might be able to solve another bigger problem. He told
Goodyear that he should work on improving India rubber, and
that if he could, he would make a lot of money.
He also mentioned that a lot of other people had
(07:54):
tried and failed and lost a lot of money in
the process, and Goodyear later wrote of this moment when
he had this conversation in the third person, stating quote,
he was not before aware that the manufacturer was so
imperfectly understood. He was blessed with ignorance of the obstacles
(08:14):
which he had subsequently to encounter, but soon learned this much,
at least, that the difficulties which attended experiments with the substance,
if not unparalleled, were of an uncommon character. From the
fact that the experimenter as well as the manufacturer, was
obliged to wait the return of both warm and cold
weather at least twelve months and often longer before he
(08:36):
could know with any certainty that his articles would not
decompose or what were the results of his labors. So, yes,
there was this huge opportunity to turn his finances around,
but it was also going to require a significant investment
of time before any benefit would even be possible. But
(08:57):
Charles Goodyear also realized that quote that which which is
hidden and unknown and cannot be discovered by scientific research,
will most likely be discovered by accident, if at all,
and by the man who applies himself most perseveringly to
the subject and is most observing of everything relating there too.
Basically like, okay, science people can't do it, but I'm
(09:19):
just gonna keep trying. So he took on this challenge,
and the biggest initial challenge with India rubber was heat.
So natural rubber, which was called India rubber, had a
lot of problems and practical applications, like indigenous people who
live in places where these plants grow have been using
natural rubber for millennia, but when we're talking about like
(09:42):
manufactured products, there were issues. It could waterproof things, but
it also melted when it got hot, and it would
stick to other things, potentially making a huge mess. When
it melted, it would lose its shape and it didn't
snap back, and environments that were hotter than one hundred
degrees fahrenheit, rubber quickly broke down completely. And it also
(10:05):
cracked in the cold, So something that was coated with
it for waterproofing would no longer be waterproof if it
got too cold. Problems with snowboots, for example, have cracked
rubber and wet feet. So if you had something coated
in India rubber, it had to have this ongoing upkeep
(10:26):
and re application to try to retain the benefits of
the rubber coating. Yeah, and as Tracy said, indigenous people
used it, but they kind of understood this and it
was part of their annual cycles to maintain their stuff
with it. Whereas to make things for manufacture, nobody wanted
to buy into a thing that you can not be
reach what a consumer product is about. We are going
(10:50):
to talk about what Charles Goodyear did right in his
early years of experimenting. After we paused for a sponsor break.
The start of Goodyear's success with rubber was in eighteen
thirty five, when he figured out how to manufacture gum
(11:13):
elastic that's just another name for natural rubber India rubber
into sheets. He added magnesium to gum rubber at a
one to one ratio, then added turpentine to liquefy it,
and then he spread that out onto marble with a
rolling pin. One account said he borrowed his wife's rolling
pin for the first batch. I don't know if that's true. Then,
(11:34):
according to his own account, he quote also commenced the
art of embossing on glazed cambrics, and he used these
sheets of rubber fabric to start making shoes, and these
were to be used for testing. These were not shoes
that were going right to consumers. And that's good because they,
like other rubber products, melted and stuck together in warm temperatures.
(11:57):
He eventually arrived at quote boiling. The article compounded with
magnesia in quicklime and water, which appeared to have the
effect of tanning the gum and destroying its viscous property.
So he thought he had managed to solve that melting problem.
By the end of eighteen thirty five, newspapers ran this
(12:17):
story quote, A discovery has been recently made by mister
Charles Goodyear, by which indiear rubber, after having been dissolved,
can be restored by a cheap process to its original whiteness,
and the pure gum be formed into a fabric that
can be used instead of cloth, leather, or parchment, and
can be molded into almost any form, and can also
(12:40):
be combined in a variety of ways with cloth, cordage,
and leather. Good Year won metals from the Mechanics Institute
and the American Institute that year for his rubber sheets.
But if those sheets were washed with anything acidic, like
even if someone put a little lemon juice in water
to wipe them down, the lime in them was neutralized
(13:02):
and they became sticky again. So in eighteen thirty six
he was back at work trying to figure out improvements,
and the solution was a little bit of an accident.
He had tried a number of things which were not working,
and then one day he boiled a piece of his
rubber fabric in lime with liquid bronze like the metal bronze,
(13:23):
and he was trying to coat this thing, but it
didn't coat the entire fabric in metal as he had hoped.
Some of it stuck, but some of it had just
slid off, and so then he tried to get the
bronze that had it here to the fabric off using
nitric acid, but that just made this ugly mess. There
was discoloration, and he threw that sample out, thinking that
(13:45):
whole plan was trashed. But then a few days later
he pulled it out of the garbage and examined it,
and he found that while it was still pliant in
the areas where he had used nitric acid, it wasn't
sticky at all. He recreated this accidental treatment with good results,
and then he developed a process for it, which he
called the acid gas process, and he patented his new
(14:08):
rubber sheets that were made this way. He also designed
a number of products using the sheets, and he was
soon manufacturing those things thanks to a friend, William Ballard,
who was willing to invest in Charles Goodyear. Feel like
he's the first of many friends who foolishly invested in
Charles Goods. Here In fact, all of his work had
(14:29):
been possible due to Goodyear's friends being really generous with him,
from loaning him workspace to actually giving him money. And
it soured some of those friendships as Goodyear worked through
multiple expensive failures, but Goodyear and Ballard also failed, and
this time it was by no fault of Goodyear. Ballard
(14:51):
ran into his own financial hardships in the events that
led up to the Panic of eighteen thirty seven, and
he declared bankruptcy the company folded. Through all of his
ups and downs, Goodyear remained fairly upbeat, and he even
made fun of himself. He included an anecdote in his
writing about the development of rubber that he wrote decades
(15:13):
later about how he was always wearing things that were
made from rubber sheeting. These were often made by his wife, Clarissa.
This was in part to show what it could do,
and also because they didn't have other things to make
clothes out of. And when someone asked one of his
friends how he would recognize Charles Goodyear if he met him,
the reply was, quote, if you meet a man who
(15:33):
has on an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and
shoes with an India rubber money purse without a cent
of money in it, that is he. Goodyear continued on
his own making rubber shoes and housewares as almost the
cottage industry, but he wasn't able to sell much. One
of the problems was that rubber had developed a bad reputation,
(15:56):
as Goodyear and other innovators had put rubber items to
market in eighteen thirty five and eighteen thirty six. A
rubber craze had driven a lot of people to purchase
rubberized items, only to discover that those items had problems,
So people were not as keen to buy stuff made
out of rubber, and retailers were also not that interested
(16:17):
in stocking rubber products honestly understandably, Goodyear regrouped, moved the
family back to New Haven, Connecticut, where they lived with
his parents, and he focused exclusively on waterproof shoes, and
he actually did okay for a while. He wasn't flush
with cash, but he was able to support his family.
(16:39):
Goodyear also met another man who worked in rubber named
Nathaniel Hayward during this period, and Hayward had figured out
a method of combining India rubber with sulfur and curing
it in the sun, and the result was a non
sticky rubber. Goodyear purchased Hayward's patent in eighteen thirty nine,
and he also hired Hayward to work with him Hayward
(17:00):
became his assistant. The sulfur treated rubber had the complete
nonstick finish that goodyear was after, but it came with
other problems. He started making all kinds of things with
this sun cured sulfur method, and he got a massive
and important order when the US Postal Service commissioned him
to make mail bags. And he made those bags and
(17:22):
he turned out really, really well. He had treated them
with chrome, lead and vermilion to make a faux leather finish.
This was something he was experimenting with a lot at
the time, and in his writing he stated quote being
desirous to beautify the fabrics with a variety of colors.
The writer used metallic and other colors indiscriminately for this purpose.
(17:44):
He treated the mail bags and then he hung them
in his workshop while he went away on vacation, And
when he got home, those bags were in piles on
the floor. The material was breaking down, and it also
smelled horrible. The rubber was rotting. He had not just
been making the mail bags this way. He'd also made
home goods and life preservers, and they had been selling.
(18:07):
And he had also been crowing to all of his
friends about his big government contract, and now people's stuff
was falling apart. He had a lot of angry consumers
and no mail bags to deliver on that contract. He wrote,
quote again, he saw those dear to him, together with
his aged parents, stripped of the comforts with which they
(18:28):
were surrounded. Everything that he possessed was brought to the
hammer for the discharge of private bills. Goodyear described this
as a time of serious misfortune in his life. He
was completely broke. He knew that he had alienated people,
describing himself as quote being justly debarred the sympathy of others.
(18:49):
A lot of people told him that he should give
up on rubber and go back to the hardware business.
She did not do that. Instead, he tried to figure
out exactly what had gone wrong with the process, and
he believed it was the colorants. His process had been
working perfectly on sheets of rubber, but these mail bags
and other new products that had failed were thicker, and
(19:11):
it seemed that the sun curing process just couldn't reach
the deeper layers of thicker items, so they weren't curing
all the way through. But though this whole ordeal would
probably destroy most people and he did seem to have
been in a downward spiral briefly, she bounced back kind
of quickly when something else caught his attention. He wrote
(19:31):
that he quote had hardly time enough to realize the
extent of his embarrassment before he became intently engaged with
another experiment and his mind buoyant with new hopes and expectations, which,
as it afterwards proved, were to be for the time
at least more than realized. In our episode about the
invention of the raincoat, we mentioned that it's often said
(19:54):
that the discovery of vulcanization was kind of an accident,
and that's true, although not in quite the way that
we said In that episode, that was sort of a
brief mention. It didn't get the kind of deeper dive
that today's episode is getting. So we know now how
things played out, at least according to Goodyear's account. He
stated that he was visiting a factory in Wourren and
(20:18):
he brought a sample of some of the compound that
had failed in the mailbags. According to him, the sample quote,
being carelessly brought in contact with a hot stove charred
like leather, so it didn't melt Goodyear described calling out
to his brother and some of the other people around
to point out how interesting this was, but it sounds
(20:39):
like they had kind of had enough of him getting
excited about things and then having them fall apart, so
nobody really paid much attention. But Goodyear really felt like
he had identified something important. His accident made him believe
that high temperature applied to a treated piece of rubber
cloth could potentially remove all of its stickiness if he
(21:01):
could just get the temperature and the exposure to it right.
So he started a series of experiments. He found that
if he heated sulfur to boiling, which is like hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of degrees that you have to reach,
he could put India rubber in it and the rubber
would not melt and it would emerge intact, soft and pliable.
(21:24):
He also tried exposing treated fabric to fire and found
that it did not melt, but it charred as it
had done it in his accident at the factory. Once
he had proof of concept, he was all in on
his new process, and he spent several months testing it.
He tested a variety of different heat sources, and as
he refined he ran processes over and over to ensure
(21:46):
the results were consistent. The rubber he produced did not
break down in high temperatures, and as for cold One
of his daughters described seeing him nail a piece of
his treated rubber outside one evening before a cold night,
and then retrieved it in the morning, and he was
elated to find that it was still flexible and it
had not cracked, so he had figured out vulcanization. He
(22:10):
also gave the process that name after the Roman god
of fire. So at this point, after all of that,
this was a thoroughly tested process that addressed the problems
that everybody was having with the production of rubber, and
it addressed all of the problems that Goodyear had had
with his own mail bags and other products. But just
as his brother and colleagues had really not wanted to
(22:32):
hear it when Charles noticed his sample not melting in
that earlier incident, the consumer market was really not interested
in vulcanized rubber. In addition to the problems with reliability
of rubber products in general, Goodyear's failures were well known.
On top of those two problems, the idea of home
(22:55):
wayer Goods was seen as a novelty. He needed to
produce something bigger if he was going to really get
a large scale buy in from a company or a
government contract. And then there was the really big obstacle.
All of the items he had vulcanized were processed in
very small setups in Goodyear's home or in workshops where
he was borrowing time. He just couldn't produce anything at
(23:19):
scale to show that he had really figured things out
this time. The rest of Goodyear's life was like an
unending roller coaster ride, and not in a good way.
We'll get into it after we hear from the sponsors.
They keep the show going. During this time in Charles
(23:45):
Goodyear's life, when he was perfecting vulcanization, his family was
really struggling. In the winter of eighteen thirty nine to
eighteen forty, there was a very heavy snowstorm and the
Goodyears were trapped in their home with no fuel to
war and no food to eat. And remember he had
quite a few kids. Charles said that he was sick,
(24:07):
but that he walked through the storm to the house
of a man named Obie Coolidge looking for help. This
was a person who's kind of like a neighbor. They
had said high on the street once or twice, but
they didn't really know each other, and according to Goodyear,
he explained to Coolidge the situation he was in, including
the work he had been doing in the previous years,
and Coolidge not only gave him help with the family's
(24:29):
immediate needs to get them warmed and fed, he also
backed Goodyear financially for continued work, giving him additional funds
to sustain his efforts. Goodyear was working at the time
to create what he described as quote a set of
military equipments for specimens, with the intention of vulcanizing them
(24:51):
as soon as an apparatus could be obtained for the purpose.
But once again his luck tanked because before he could
vulcanize these items, the rubber fermented and they fell apart.
He had lost an entire winter's worth of work. He
talked the experience up to a learning opportunity, recognizing that
he could not mix natural rubber with a solvent and
(25:14):
then compound it with lead and sulfur unless he was
ready to vulcanize that right away. Finally, there was a
potential breakthrough, but it wasn't in the way that Goodyear anticipated.
He was approached by a French firm called Ratier in
Gibas to license his acid gas process, but he didn't
(25:34):
want to give it to them because he felt like
he was so close to large scale vulcanization and that
it would be a far better process for them to license.
This is really frustrating to read about because he continued
to put his family in peril by saying no, no,
just wait a little longer. When his two year old
son was dangerously ill because he had not taken this contract,
(25:58):
Goodyear wrote to a friend for hell and he got
back seven dollars and a letter chastising him for not
taking some sort of stable work to support his family.
With money borrowed from relatives, Goodyear took some of his
small home vulcanized items to New York and then once
again got funding, this time from a man named William Ryder.
(26:21):
This enabled Goodyear to set up a large scale facility
in Springfield, Massachusetts, and he started to gain some momentum.
He started getting orders for goods and he was getting
the business in decent shape when he got hit with
another bit of bad fortune. He landed in debtors jail again.
He was thirty five thousand dollars in the hull, and
(26:41):
people were filing claims against him, but this time he
took the option of declaring bankruptcy to get out of
that situation. Even so, once he was free from prison,
he continued to work until the debts he had were
all paid off. Shockingly, that only took a few months.
Yeah that French company and others did start to get
(27:02):
licensed deals with him, and that helped him really get
to a much more stable financial footing for a while.
The eighteen forties started with great promise, although Goodyear was
not entirely satisfied with the vulcanization process when it came
to fabric, which was really one of the big applications
of it. And the problem was that the fabrics that
Goodyear was adhering his vulcanized rubber to just didn't always
(27:25):
stay at here. He tried a lot of different kinds
of fabrics and they all had this problem. He spent
a lot of time year solving this problem, and it
ultimately saw Goodyear abandoning this idea of adhering the rubber
to fabric and instead directly mixing cotton fibers into his
India rubber in its liquid form. Before he'd laid it
(27:46):
out flat and vulcanized it, and this basically created an
entirely new fabric. Additionally, Goodyear did not really want to
run a factory. He was intent on licenses serving as
his income. But it took kind of a weird path
to try to get there, because he kept inventing uses
for vulcanized rubber and then building prototypes not to put
(28:09):
these items into production, just to show that this could
be done. This was a very expensive way to do business,
and he had taken so much time trying to perfect
things that other chemists were now able to develop their
own processes before he finally got a patent for vulcanization
in eighteen forty four. That led to legal issues down
(28:30):
the road. Yeah, we will talk about another patent holder
in just a moment. His next goal was to showcase
his inventions at world expositions. He spent years preparing to
exhibit at the eighteen fifty one Great Exhibition in London,
where he showed off vulcanization at frequent flyer on our
show The Crystal Palace. He won a medal for his efforts.
(28:51):
People really did recognize he had figured out a pretty
cool thing. But even as he was still celebrating his triumph,
he found himself in broiled in one legal battle after another.
In eighteen fifty two, he sued Horace Day for patent infringement,
and he actually hired Daniel Webster to represent him. That
was apparently very expensive. I saw one thing that claimed
(29:13):
that he paid Daniel Webster ten thousand dollars for that.
In eighteen fifty one, he did win the suit, and
he celebrated by taking the entire family to Europe. There
was some business in hand on that trip. Charles McIntosh,
the inventor of the raincoat, had a business partner named
Thomas Hancock. Hancock had patented his method for vulcanization, which
(29:37):
also used sulfur in Britain, at the same time that
Goodyear was getting his patent. Goodyear, no doubt, feeling confident
after the whole Horace Day verdict, intended to sue on
the grounds that Hancock had copied him. McIntosh, undoubtedly wanting
to keep his company out of any kind of legal mess,
tried to smooth things over and offered to give Goodyear
(29:59):
one half of the patent that Hancock held if Charles
would just drop his legal action. Goodyear refused, and later
he must have regretted this because he lost his case.
He could have had half of the British rights, but
then he returned home with nothing other than a big
legal bill. Yeah, there are many versions of the good
(30:22):
Year story that kind of tell his life story in
parallel to Hancock. And there is the possibility that Hancock
had gotten there's like an apocryphal story that he got
a piece of rubber that Goodyear had worked on and
he smelled sulfur on it and that led him to
his version. But we don't know that for sure. But
Goodyear made one bad decision after another, including going no, no,
(30:46):
I don't need all the money that you're gonna make.
That's fine, I'll make it all. And he didn't make
any The bad luck also continued. Clarissa Goodyear's wife of
almost thirty years at that point, died in March of
eighteen fifty three. He did remarry a year later to
a woman from London named Fanny Wardell. In the months
(31:06):
after Clarissa's death, Goodyear wrote and published his own account
of his life and work, titled gum Elastic and Its Varieties,
with a detailed account of its applications and uses, and
of the discovery of vulcanization. This book definitely reads as
though one of its goals is to establish Goodyear as
the inventor of vulcanized rubber. He opens the book, which
(31:29):
is more than five hundred pages long, with quote. The
writer finds himself so identified with the subject that he
deems it impossible to give a correct history of the
recent inventions in gum elastic without alluding to himself oftener
than he could wish by speaking of the trials and
discouragements which he had to encounter during the first seven
(31:51):
years of his experiments. In this writing, Goodyear goes right
to the basics. He talks about the Ficus elastica and
the West world's access to it. That's the tree that
it comes from, noting that while it grows in numerous regions,
its accessibility and cheaper cost in India at the time
resulted in most of it being sourced from there. And
(32:13):
he describes the process of getting the milky rubbery kouchuk
from the plant and processing it for use in various
forms that happened from the seventeen hundreds on. He compares
it and its uses to other substances like bitumen and
gud apercha. He walks the reader through the problems of
early rubber, which he calls gum or gum elastic. Quote.
(32:36):
In the early attempts to manufacture the gum in the
United States, it was found that no kind except that
which had been cured could be manufactured in any way
into goods that would not in a very short time decompose.
He noted that the way India prepped it for export
was part of the problem, and he hoped that they
would shift their methods as the global rubber industry grew
(32:59):
and more countries started making their own rubber supply available.
He also recognizes in this writing that, due to his
own advancements as well as those of others, the applications
that were making use of rubber were rapidly expanding. He
wrote about this in a way which evidences a racist
bias as well. He wrote, quote, the certainty that there
(33:20):
will in future be a very great consumption of the
various kinds of India rubber and waterproof gums has caused
a good deal of apprehension with many as to the supply,
and it is asked, where is it to come from?
Will there not be a scarcity. It is true that,
owing to the sudden and rapid extension of the manufacture,
together with some commercial speculation in the article, the price
(33:43):
has for the present year eighteen fifty one been unusually high.
So he started writing this couple years before it came out, apparently,
but this is a state of things which will not continue.
The supply is literally inexhaustible. There is a belt of
forest trees extending ten degrees each side of the equator
around the globe, which yield these gums of various kinds,
(34:06):
and has been the case with turpentine and resin the
greater the demand, the cheaper. In all probability, these substances
will be when once the attention of mankind is turned
to the subject, and that which is already being done
enterprising civilized races engage in the business of collecting it,
instead of relying on one tribe of Indians on a
(34:26):
single river, there will no longer be any solicitude on
the score of supply. The year after his second wedding,
Goodyear was back in Europe for another world's fair, the
Exposition Universal of Paris of eighteen fifty five. He spent
a lot of money on this effort, and reported fifty
thousand dollars. He spent so much money over the course
(34:49):
of the fair. While he was in France, he once
ran into money issues and ended up in a French
debtors prison. It sometimes reported that he received the French
legion of Hotter Metal while in prison, but Holly could
not find him in the legion of Honor registry Nope.
Once he was released from Debtors prison in France, Goodyear,
(35:10):
who had a long history of dyspepsia, was quite sick.
He's often described as having a variety of ailments, but
what they are is a little bit unclear. But he
was sick enough at this point that he thought he
was dying, and he actually sent letters to his friends
and family saying so and basically telling them goodbye. He
and Fanny traveled from France to Bath, England, and he
(35:33):
stayed there until eighteen fifty eight, so several years, as
his wife took care of him. He returned to the
US in May eighteen fifty eight, having pawned his wife's
jewelry to pay for that voyage. His business was a mess,
but he was able to get his patent extended for
seven years and that offered a fairly decent income. Goodyear
(35:56):
used the money he was bringing in to set up
a new home in Washington, d c. In eighteen sixty,
he learned that his daughter Cynthia was dying in Connecticut,
and he immediately set off by steamer to see her,
leaving Fanny and their five day old new daughter at home.
When this ship docked in New York, Goodyear was exhausted
(36:16):
from days of seasickness, and he was also met with
the news that Cynthia had already died. Goodyear was so
stricken that he could not continue on to Connecticut, and
he was taken to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Fanny hurried
to meet him there after being notified that he was
on his deathbed. He lived for several weeks after this
(36:37):
and died on July first, at the age of fifty nine.
Goodyear unsurprisingly left a massive debt behind, totaling right around
two hundred thousand dollars. His son, Charles Junior, much better
with money than his father, settled his outstanding debts and
using the remaining money due through patent licensing, was able
(36:58):
to set up a fund to take care of Goodyear's
remaining dependent family. When the patents expired in eighteen sixty five,
Charles Junior sold the rights to the Goodyear name. Charles
Goodyear's life was so full of ups and downs, and
he was obviously a driven man and even a visionary
of sorts, but the task of managing businesses related to
(37:21):
his ideas was something he never got the hang of.
He wrote of the hardship of being an inventor in
this way quote he takes the precaution to procure letters
patent for his invention, which he counts as property, but
which amounts chiefly to this that the government grants him
permission to fight his own battles. Next comes the herculean
(37:43):
task of convincing the public of the advantages of the improvement,
and yet the more difficult one of supplying the market
with the improvement himself, and of preventing others from doing
it by encroaching on his patent. If his object is
to derived I have a prophet by disposing of his
patents for his inventions. It is well known that patents
(38:05):
are so commonly evaded in some way, and that the
patent law is so ineffectual for their protection, that the
public will not value them highly, if at all. Incidentally,
if you're thinking, yeah, but there's a Goodyear company that
still exists today that was not started by Charles Goodyear
or any of his descendants, although the name is inspired
(38:28):
by his work. That company was founded in eighteen ninety eight,
so almost forty years after Charles Goodyear died by a
man named Frank Sieberling. Okay. Did not know that me
either until I was working on this. Do you have
some listener mail? I do. I have so many thoughts
(38:48):
about Charles Goodyear. Can't wait for Friday. I have a
listener mail from Teresa or Teresa who writes, Hello, ladies.
I just finished your episode on the UFITZI Gallery and
it had everything international travel, well art, history, restoration. Michael
Kiboman quotes labor protests. What prompted me to write was
the date of the event. An event that happened in
my own lifetime always makes me feel old, sure, but
(39:11):
also brings me back to some questions I liked discussing
with my high school students when I used to teach
the history unit for a class called Theory of Knowledge.
When does an event become history versus current events? What
is worth preserving, whether physically or through story. Is the
passage of time helpful or detrimental for creating a more
accurate understanding of the past. Theory of knowledge is a
(39:35):
required course for kids in the International Baccalaureate Program IB
for short, and for a student in IB to write
a history essay, they are required to write on something
at least ten years in the past. The election of
twenty sixteen could now be considered history, as if the
nineteen nineties being history isn't weird enough. I would love
to hear your discussion on this. I no longer teach,
(39:56):
but work in education policy, trying to make teaching better
for teas teachers. I appreciate every single time you give
a shout out to the teachers on your show. This
episode had that too. I'll do it again. Thank you educators.
Since I've included pet tax in previous emails and I
know you like art. Attached are some of my artworks
featuring my pets, Raku, the Great Pyrenees border Collie mix,
(40:18):
Ruby the super mutt are in the paper cutout Christmas card,
and Treyla, the very cute but often evil eldercat in
the form of a felted toy partially made with her
actual fur. Thank you for all your work and amazing
stories you share with us every week. I love this
email because it brings up a thing that we talk
about on the show sometimes. Yeah, but we haven't in
(40:39):
a minute, and I think it's worth looking at. We
don't have a hard rule. We have ruleish kind of like,
usually we don't do stuff that's like after I don't know, sixties,
seventies usually, Yeah. Occasionally we've done something that's been more
into the eighties, usually something that was not such big
(41:01):
news in the eighties that are listeners of a comparable
age to us would have huge memories of it. So
the bombing part of the UFC episode was like more
recent than we typically talk about. Yeah. And the logic
for me of that, and what often happens in anything
(41:21):
that we end up talking about that is more like
eighties or in this case nineties, is that it ties
to something much older. Yeah. And so for me, I
talked about at the beginning of that episode that what
got me was that picture of the or not that
picture that that impression left by a window that they
leave in one of the vaulted ceilings in the ufize,
but it really like what got me really excited was
(41:44):
looking at how they're trying to preserve history that was lost, right,
And so that gave us an opportunity to talk about art,
which I always wanted to do, and Bartolomeo Manfredi and
like a little Caravaggio in there, which is also something
I love talking about. So it's kind of like a
through line that brings us to that moment in the nineties,
which is very pivotal to the story and that you know,
(42:07):
I try to give as much information as possible within
the confines of our show, right, but it has to
connect usually to something that happened much earlier than that
for us to walk you through those decades. Yeah, there's
not a like, there's not a hard and fast rule
of when something becomes history. I'm a big fan of
(42:28):
the ask Historians subreddit, which is one of the best
moderated communities on Reddit. If you're like, ah, I read it.
They their mobs are on top of it, and they
have rules about what is appropriate to both post and comment.
And if I'm remembering correctly, their rule is a twenty
(42:49):
year rule, because that is sort of what they have
come to feel like is an appropriate amount, Like you
have enough remove from the thing happening after twenty years
to look back on it, and you could make arguments
for amounts of time longer or shorter than that, but
that's sort of where they have arrived. And that has
also meant that when a twentieth anniversary of big big
(43:12):
things are coming up, they have to kind of like
brace for all of the questions about that thing that
are likely to happen. Yeah. So yeah, I mean we
take it on a case by case basis, and there
are times where we'll check in with each other and go,
this is going to get into recent stuff. Do you
think that's okay, just as like a gut check. Right.
(43:32):
I have also heard I feel like I had a
professor in college who said that their rule of thumb
is its history. If it's the previous generations thing, like
you may have lived through part of it, but like
if it was really a thing that impacted your parents,
it's you could consider that history. And that's the thing.
There's no rule, not just for us, but I don't
(43:54):
think anywhere you can't you can make guidelines. Right. We
talked about it a little bit in the when we
did the episodes about the Vietnam draft board raids. When
we started working on this episode, I are not this
episode this podcast. When we joined as hosts, the Vietnam
(44:16):
War felt too recent to me, But that was now
more than ten years ago, and we are farther from
that now, so that felt less less too recent for me.
I have other reasons. Yeah, we're getting close to fifteen
years ago. Yeah, that's true a long time. I think
(44:39):
we're at thirteen right now, at least from when I
when I came on. Oh yeah, he came on a
little earlier than me, so yeah. Yeah. The other thing
that you asked about in your email about like do
we get more clarity or less the farther things go back.
(45:00):
This is something that like the show I used to
work on, Criminalia, was kind of entirely based on this,
Like if we look at crimes, historical true crime from
the past through a modern lens with more research, like,
are any of these criminals and villains actually kind of misunderstood?
Which is often the case, right, A lot of women
(45:21):
that were vilified throughout history. It's like, no, that's not
what's going on here. I mean, we had cases on
that show of women who were considered witches and it
turned out really they were dealing with, you know, some
kind of mental illness or even a physical infirmity that
made them other that they got you know, ostracized, or
(45:42):
like there were people that when you look at the
bigger picture, you understand, oh, they've kind of been the
victim of bad press throughout history because one person told
their story and that's what got repeated. We see that
all the time on this show as well. And so
that is another thing that's case by case. Right, Sometimes
you have better perspective from a distance, but you also
(46:05):
lose clarity in terms of like being able to say
with certainty what certain details were. This came up on
your Elizabeth Blackwell something so that you researched where it's
like people thought she was born at one point and
she was this Elizabeth, but really she's actually a different
Elizabeth than We only recently figured that out, yep. And
(46:26):
I say we meaning historians, Tracy and I did not
figure that out. She referenced the history who we cited
in the episode. But so that too is a little
bit case by case. I think there are sometimes where
you get a treasure trove of information kind of dropped
that nobody knew throughout history and only came to light
because modern you know, living technology, records access enabled somebody
(46:51):
to find it. And other times it gets farther, it
gets more and more lost, right, I mean. Thomas Harriet's
another one. We didn't know he was the first person
to look at the moon through a telescope because he
didn't publish about it. They found his notes in the
trash four hundred years later they get in a midden
heap on his family's property, so we don't know. Yeah,
(47:12):
we always love those surprises. That's why Onearthed is so popular.
I think it did shifts everybody's gears about what they think.
It's going to be. Time to work on that soon,
I know. Anyway, that's the long answer to you, and
I hope it was illuminating and not overwhelming. If you
would like to write to us and ask us a question,
(47:32):
or share pictures of art, animals, whatever, also thank you
for the art. We always love it. Listen, we love
a little felted activity that's made of cat for You
can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
If you want to see the show notes and the
resources that we used to put together an episode. You
can do that at mistinhistory dot com. If you would
(47:55):
like to subscribe to the show and you haven't gotten
to that yet, easypsy race and Cheesy, you could do
it on the eye Heart Radio app, or anywhere you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(48:18):
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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