THE AMOUNT OF RUBBER required for automotive use is fantastic. For every two people on the face of the earth there is one rubber tree under cultivation and the vast bulk of all rubber produced is used in an automotive connection. In the United States we import half the world’s supply and in addition make as much artificial or synthetic rubber as we import.
Rubber is made from latex a milky substance found in the inner bark of the rubber tree. When the bark is cut the elongated cells of the latex will flow much like maple syrup from a maple tree. Long before Columbus discovered America the natives in the Amazon River Valley of South America were making waterproof boots by pouring latex on their legs and feet and permitting it to dry naturally. When it was dry they simply peeled it off.
The Aztecs in Mexico the Incas of Peru and the Mayans of the Yucatan Peninsula all used latex in one form or another for personal or religious use. It had they thought magical properties.
Columbus is supposed to be the first white man to see rubber. When he was in what is now Haiti in 1492 he saw boys playing with a bouncing ball. They told him it was made from the fluid which flowed from certain trees. He sent some of the curious substance back to Europe. It was waterproof and man desperately needed a plentiful water proofing substance.
It wasn’t a simple substance to work with however and taxed the greatest brains of Europe for centuries as they sought means to put it to work. Joseph Priestly a British Methodist clergyman and scientist (and good friend of Dr. Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia in the Colonies) was brilliant enough to isolate and “invent” oxygen but of all his efforts with latex the best he could come up with was the discovery that if you took a piece of latex and rubbed a pencil mark with it the mark would disappear. From that revelation the world got its name for the substance rubber.
Another Englishman in 1823 found that it was possible to dissolve latex or rubber in a naptha solution. He took two layers of fabric spread a coating of rubber between them and pressed them together. When they dried Charles Mackintosh had a waterproof fabric from which it was possible to make rainproof clothing. Such coats were naturally known as Mackintoshes and as mackintoshes they are known today.
Thomas Hancock another English experimenter with rubber at about the same period in history came up with the first air pillow the first air mattress the first rubber impregnated hose and waterproof mailbags. Most importantly he toyed with his idea that if he could somehow get rubber to adhere to a carriage wheel it would cut down noise increase traction and be in just about every way superior to naked iron alone.
It worked as he thought it would when it worked. Unfortunately it didn’t work for very long. The rubber would either come off the iron strapping of the wheel or wear out much too quickly or it would decompose just sitting in the sun.
The trouble with rubber was that it had a natural and apparently uncontrollable tendency to return to its natural state. Rubber products no matter what they were had a nasty habit of turning back into goo.
This characteristic of rubber was either not known to the businessmen who formed the Roxbury India Rubber Company of Roxbury Massachusetts in 1832 or with typical American self assurance they figured they could succeed in finding a solution where the brightest scientists of Europe had failed. In any event they went into business apparently choosing the word “India” for its sound rather than any connection with that British colony and began manufacturing the same sort of products Hancock had been making in England.
In Philadelphia meanwhile a hardware merchant named Charles Goodyear was in the painful process of going bankrupt. As the creditors closed in he announced that he was working on a marvelous invention which would make him rich and see the creditors paid. What he had invented was a valve through which air could be forced by mouth. Its purpose was to save human life. If the valve were connected with a rubber bag of appropriate shape probably something like a doughnut, the rubber could be expanded and would float.
Goodyear hadn’t had much experience with rubber but he’d heard about it and just as soon as his valve was perfected he was going to offer it to the Roxbury India Rubber Company. By the time the valve was completed Goodyear’s creditors had lost their patience and the bankruptcy was a fact.
Undiscouraged he went to the Roxbury India Rubber Company salesroom in New York City. They agreed that it was a fine valve and would be just what they needed if it weren’t for one minor thing. When Goodyear inquired what that might be he was taken to the storeroom and shown foul smelling lumps of goo which had once been the proud new production of Roxbury India Rubber Company. He was told as one failed businessman to another that officers at the plant in Massachusetts had gathered one dark night to bury more than $20000 worth of returned rubber products to hide the smell.
Goodyear rather than discouraged was fascinated. He would succeed where everybody else had failed. He returned to Philadelphia and found himself in Debtor’s Prison. Even that didn’t bother him. He had his wife bring him a supply of latex and a rolling pin. Maybe what was needed was kneading and rolling like bread.
When he was released from jail he talked one of his diminishing numbers of friends into lending him enough money to make rubber overshoes. He kept these dry by mixing the latex with powdered magnesia. The overshoes looked great until warm weather came whereupon they turned into a sick gray paste.
The creditors were closing in again so he went to New York and talked an obliging druggist into providing him with a supply of latex an assortment of chemicals (what was needed now he announced with certainty was quicklime and powdered magnesia ) and a place to experiment.
This seemed to work. Not only did it cure the natural latex but it permitted the surface to be painted. Goodyear started making sample products and painting them. On one occasion when the painting job was botched he tried to remove the paint with nitric acid. This was really discouraging. Instead of a nice white color the sample turned black and disgusted Goodyear threw it in a corner.
A few days later he picked it up and found that the nitric acid had done something to the rubber’s surface. It was now cloth smooth. It was smooth enough and so was Good year to parlay the nitric acid treated reject into a loan of several thousand dollars. The problem of what to do with rubber was solved. Goodyear and all associated with him would grow rich.
The recession of 1837 (then known more aptly as “the Panic’’) came along and there was no money available to finish his production facilities so once again he was bankrupt.
And up again he bounced with a new idea. If he could only borrow a small amount of money he could buy the material he needed to sell waterproof mailbags to the government. He got the money by telling fresh creditors that the government wanted his rubber mailbags. Then he went to the Post Office Department and told them that rubber mail bags were the latest thing in England and that every post office worthy of the name was buying them. The Post Office agreed to buy 150 of them and more if they were anything nearly as good as Goodyear promised.
The bags were made from nitric acid treated latex. Goodyear put them in a storeroom and took a month’s vacation with his family confident that vacations would now be a familiar part of his life. When he came back he found a foul smelling pile of semi liquid ooze that had once been 150 mailbags. The nitric acid only treated the surface. Beneath the surface was raw latex which had attempted to return to its natural state.
He went from New York to Massachusetts where kindly farmers fed his starving family while pointedly suggesting to Goodyear that he would find the grass greener elsewhere.
He ignored the suggestion for now he had really found the solution: Sulfur. Sulfur rather than powdered magnesium and quicklime were the answer. He couldn’t understand why he had ever thought nitric acid would do the trick.
He went to the local store owned by a man named Woburn to whom Goodyear owed a good deal of money and where his credit was long exhausted and announced that the problem was solved. Woburn laughed at him. Goodyear waved a handful of his formula around in his hand. A glob of it flew off and landed on the stove.
He went to scrape it off for burning rubber then as now smells very bad. It had not melted but charred and around the charred area was a small circle of brown. Ignoring Woburn’s pointed invitation to get out of the store and take that foul stuff with him he examined the brown material. It was still elastic but obviously a whole new product not subject to melting with the application of heat but just as waterproof as natural latex.
Heat rather than chemicals was the answer. Woburn seemed unimpressed and again bluntly told him to get out. Goodyear spent almost a year working on his new theory.
He fell ill and his family grew thinner and the subject of ever more pity on the part of the community who regarded Goodyear as an unfeeling father as well as a candidate for the county asylum. He had taken to announcing that he was going to succeed despite what anybody said because he was God’s chosen instrument to give rubber to mankind.
Finally he announced again that the problem was solved once and for all: He had discovered that the way to cure latex was to subject it to steam under pressure for several hours. Steam under pressure like that in a pressure cooker achieves a higher temperature than steam in the atmosphere.
This time he was right. He had solved the problem. Now the question was what to do with it. His brother in law was vulnerable to the suggestion that threads of rubber woven together with cotton fiber into cloth would produce the wrinkled effect that was then the high fashion. With money advanced by his brother in law he was able to license fabric manufacturers to make such cloth. He was paid a royalty of three cents a yard. The fabric manufacturers charged three dollars a yard more for rubber laced material.
But that didn’t bother Goodyear. He now had enough money to carry the rest of his dream to fruition. First of all he started to dress himself hat to shoes in rubber clothing.
He had a rubber calling card and announced that the only material suited for “paper” currency was obviously rubber. Canvas sails were wholly inadequate now that rubber was available. And while he was thinking he proposed such things as rubber violins and rubber sheets on which books could be printed.
Not all of his ideas were farfetched. He suggested rubber paint inflatable life rafts waterproof suits for divers and air inflated wheelbarrow tires. He was however a businessman of incredible ineptitude.
Almost as soon as Goodyear’s rubber technique became known patented or not other people started to infringe on his rights. He had always believed in doing things on the grand scale so he hired the best known lawyers of the day one of the best known of all time Daniel Webster to represent him in court. Webster was at the time U. S. Secretary of State and reluctant to cast any shadow on the dignity of that office by appearing in court in a civil suit. But money talks to Secretaries of State as well as other people. For $15000 up to that time the highest legal fee ever paid to a lawyer Webster went to court and made a two day speech in Goodyear’s behalf.
The court not surprisingly found in his favor but that didn’t stop the theft of his patent rights. Goodyear took his time too in applying for British and other world patents on his processes. That cost him dearly.
In England Hancock (who after all had been experimenting with rubber long before Goodyear) came across some Goodyear rubber product. He saw a “flush” or a “bloom” on its surface and went from there to a guess that it was caused by sulfur used in the processing. He began to conduct his own experiments and came up with a satisfactory process. He then asked the British patent office if his process was patentable or whether it violated the Goodyear patent. He was told there was no British Goodyear patent whereupon he applied for his own patent several weeks before Goodyear finally got around to applying for a patent in England then the world’s most industrialized nation.
Goodyear was furious. Hancock appears to have behaved as the British gentleman he was. He pointed out that while the law was entirely on his side he who gets to the patent office first gets the paten the appreciated Goodyear’s long years of work with rubber which paralleled his own. He offered Goodyear half of his earnings from the British patent.
Goodyear chose to ignore the fact that Hancock had been working with rubber years before he had heard of it; his own laxness in not applying for a patent; plus his weak legal position; and took Hancock to court.
There was no case. Hancock was named the sole proprietor of the patent in the British Empire. In the British Empire at first and later around the world the Goodyear Hancock processing of rubber became known as “Vulcanization” after the Greek god of fire the name suggested by a friend of Hancock’s.
Goodyear lurched onward and upward with rubber. At both Paris and London during the 1850s he built entire buildings floors to ceilings and all the furniture out of rubber as his contribution to the Paris and London World’s Fairs. In Paris while the Parisians were oohing and aahing over this latest scientific miracle a Paris court threw out his French patents on a technicality. That shut off his French royalty payments and turned on his French creditors and he got to see the inside of the Paris Debtor’s Jail.
While he was locked up there came one day a delegation from Emperor Napoleon III himself. The cell doors were swung open an elegantly garbed bureaucrat pinned the Legion of Honor on Goodyear kissed him on both cheeks in behalf of his Imperial Majesty and then stepped aside as the cell door was swung closed on him again.
There was money of course not much but some in America and eventually enough of it could be sent to France to get Charles Goodyear Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur out of the Paris Municipal Jail.
Goodyear died his faith in the future of rubber undiminished in i860. He was $200000 in debt at his death. But once the Goodyear interests were no longer under his control money began to flow in and his family became moderately wealthy although they were not a fraction as wealthy as they would have been had his business sense matched his inventive genius and determination. A patent on rubber making worldwide which had been within his grasp would very likely have made him the richest man in the world.
Twenty five years after Charles Goodyear died a German named Carl Benz offered the first automobile for sale. It was a three wheeled affair a single wheel in the front connected to a tiller so that it could be steered and two larger wheels in back both driven by chain from a .75 horse power single cylinder engine.
The wheels looked like oversized bicycle wheels with narrow rims connected to a hub by steel spokes. The rims held the tire a strip of solid rubber wider than it was high about % inch thick by two inches wide.
A photograph of the three wheels 1887 Benz shows the wire spokes replaced by wooden spokes and the “tire” almost as deep as it is wide still about two inches. In 1891 Benz went to a four wheeled car again with wooden spoke wheels buggy wheels and again with the rubber “tire” which appears more substantial. It really became with the 1891 Benz a separate component of the wheel system rather than a protective coating for the steel rimmed wheel.
In that year the Steinway Piano Company of New York then as now a most respected member of the business community announced that it had become the sole United States representative of the Daimler Motor Company. When this news reached the ears of the Duryea brothers Charles E. and J. Frank they decided that the automobile might be their ticket to wealth. Charles E. handled the business arrangements (which consisted in the main of buying a one cylinder gasoline engine and a secondhand buggy for $70) while J. Frank took over engineering and manufacturing (which consisted of mounting a gear on the rear wheels and connecting it with a chain to the engine which he had mounted beneath the buggy seat).
The first American horseless buggy was just that. But it worked and it looked as if it had positive commercial possibilities and the Duryea brothers set out to build better ones.
One of the things wrong with the first Duryea was its wheels which were the original buggy wheels wooden spokes supporting a circle of wood with a band of steel around that. With the horse gone the Duryea brothers were suddenly made aware that the horse had a braking power as well as a pulling power and that all that buggy wheels really did was follow. An auto mobile a safe auto mobile was going to require wheels which would have as much “foot” on the ground as a horse’s hoofs had. Steel tires simply weren’t going to provide it even if they were made much wider than standard tires. That would increase weight too and it was obvious that the wider the steel tire the more “foot”. It had the harder it would be to steer.
Investigation revealed that a new type of bicycle tire had been patented in the United States that very year. It was the latest word in a science which had begun a half century before with an Englishman named Robert William Thompson. Thompson had invented the pneumatic tire much as we know it today. It consisted of a non stretchable outer cover held in place by the air pressure in an inner rubber tube.
Built and installed on a horse drawn brougham the tire had traveled 1200 miles before failure. But with the horse serving as brake engine and steering device there had been little commercial need for a pneumatic tire and nothing much had been done with it until the eighteen nineties when an Irishman named John Boyd Dunlop decided that a pneumatic tire was just what the bicycle needed. His tires had an outer covering of fabric.
Next came, the invention of Thomas B. Jeffery. In his tire there was a wire on each side which when the inner tube was inflated meshed with a rim on the wheel and held the whole thing together. Jeffery’s patent issued in the United States in 1892 differed only in minor details from a patent issued in England to William E. Bartlett in 1890. In 1893 an American patent had been granted to Englishman John Fullerton Palmer for a “cord” tire. The outer covering was of fabric cord impregnated with rubber.
The Duryea brothers decided this was just what they wanted. They went to the Hartford Rubber Works in Connecticut and announced what they needed. Hartford came through and the first pneumatic tires were installed on a Duryea automobile on March 11 1895.
In that car on Thanksgiving Day 1895 with J. Frank Duryea driving and Brother Charles sitting beside him in a derby that the Duryea won the first United States automobile race in which more than two cars competed. Sponsored by the Chicago Times Herald the Duryea raced 54 miles between points in Chicago and Evanston Illinois in a blazing seven hours and 53 minutes an amazing seven and a half miles an hour.