Charles Goodyear

Charles Goodyear was an American inventor who spent years experimenting with natural rubber after his father's hardware business failed, searching for a way to stop the material from turning brittle in cold weather and sticky in heat. In 1839, while working at the Eagle India Rubber Company in Woburn, Massachusetts, he accidentally dropped a rubber and sulfur mixture onto a hot stove and found that the scorched sample had become smooth, firm and stable across a wide range of temperatures, a process he later named vulcanization after the Roman god of fire. He spent five more years refining the process before receiving a US patent on it in 1844, but he never secured the wealth the invention created: he died in 1860 while traveling to see his dying daughter, with his estate roughly two hundred thousand dollars in debt. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company that later carried his name was founded decades after his death by people with no direct connection to him.