mark twain

Charles Goodyear was born in New Haven, Connecticut on December 29, 1800 to Amasa and Cynthia Goodyear. Charles’s father was a hardware manufacture and a merchant. Amasa Goodyear built mainly farming tools like hayforks and scythes, which he invented. When Charles was a teenager he wanted to go into the ministry and become a pastor, but his father convinced him that he was a good business man and placed him in the hardware store of the Rogers brothers in Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. He worked there until he was twenty-one years old. At that time he returned to New Haven to join his father’s business, making farm tools. For five years he worked for his father, building up the family business. On August 24, 1824, while he was still working for his father he married Clarissa Beecher who also lived in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1826 Charles Goodyear decided to move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There he opened a hardware store where he sold the products that his father made. Four years after opening this store both Amasa and Charles Goodyear were bankrupt because they would extend credit to customers and the customers would never pay back the money that they owed. Charles’s health started to decline and both

Finally, the process was perfect, and Goodyear got the celebrated Patent No. When he died he left his widow and six children with a debt of approximately two hundred thousand dollars! Without Goodyear"tms discovery where would we be today We would still have wood or stone tires. The India rubber business had rebounded, but only selling limited products. The India rubber market was beginning to fail because the rubber would melt in the summer heat, therefore it would cost him almost nothing to buy the rubber. In 1834 when he was in New York, on a business trip, the Roxbury India Rubber Company caught his eye. They saw some of his work and allowed him to rent a small portion of the factory and use their machinery. For the next thirty years Charles Goodyear was thrown in prison over ten times because he didn"tmt pay his debts. They discovered this when they were arguing one day and they spilled the mixture on a stove. In 1837 Goodyear devised a process in which he coated the India rubber with metal and acid (this is only part of the vulcanization process). In the summer the soles of our shoes would stick to the pavement and we would never be able to erase on a paper when we made a mistake. With the things that he did make out of India rubber (which were failures to making a better type of rubber) they were sold to pawn shops to produce some income.