Charles Goodyear: The Man Who Tamed Rubber

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
In the 1830s, India rubber was the wonder material that betrayed everyone who touched it: it kept out the rain in spring and melted into glue in the summer heat. Investors who had rushed into the rubber mania wanted nothing more to do with it. One man wanted more to do with it than anyone alive — a failed Connecticut hardware merchant named Charles Goodyear, who had already lost a store, a farm, and his freedom to debt, and who became convinced that rubber's flaw was a problem to be solved rather than a verdict to be accepted.

Over eleven hours of listening, this biography follows the obsession and its astonishing price: ruin in Philadelphia; the surface cures that gleamed and failed; the rotting government mail bags; Woburn, where Nathaniel Hayward's sulfur process and one winter accident at a hot stove revealed that heat was the missing key; five grinding years of perfection while his family survived on charity; the 1844 patent that should have made him rich; the British patent lost by weeks to Thomas Hancock; Horace Day's industrial-scale infringement; Daniel Webster's last great courtroom triumph; the Legion of Honor — and a Paris debtors' prison. It ends with the strangest legacy in American invention: a man dead in 1860 owing a fortune, whose name a stranger's company would carry onto tires, airships, and a billion wheels.