# Charles Goodyear and Vulcanized Rubber

An episode of [Stuff You Missed in History Class](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/283605519), 13 Jul 2026, 48 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/cfb428ef-eafc-44d0-9d09-ae2701747e6f/6181c329-e671-47bc-997f-b485004e4ded/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=fb626e1f-112c-4246-a40d-ae2701747e7d

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 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
[0:04] Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
[0:13] Speaker 1: Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And this is not
[0:16] Speaker 1: the episode I set out to write. So funny, I
[0:21] Speaker 1: was going to do an episode on sneaker history. Listen,
[0:24] Speaker 1: I probably still will. I still love shoes. But one
[0:27] Speaker 1: of the things that I wanted to do in setting
[0:29] Speaker 1: up that episode was to talk about Charles Goodyear because
[0:35] Speaker 1: his work really led to the development of the sneaker industry,
[0:41] Speaker 1: because they need those souls, like that's the distinguishing characteristic
[0:46] Speaker 1: of sneakers. And he had come up on our episode
[0:49] Speaker 1: on raincoat History, but we didn't go very deep into
[0:52] Speaker 1: his life story, and his work is really very important
[0:56] Speaker 1: to a lot of the things that we have in
[0:59] Speaker 1: the twenty first century. It was, as I said, very
[1:02] Speaker 1: pivotal to the development of the sneaker. But in the
[1:05] Speaker 1: process of trying to give him some time for a
[1:08] Speaker 1: little mini biography at the front end of that episode,
[1:11] Speaker 1: I just realized he had to end up being the
[1:13] Speaker 1: whole episode. Because I was intrigued, not in always a
[1:18] Speaker 1: great way. I was also really frustrated you're going to
[1:20] Speaker 1: see you also will be frustrated with this man. Charles
[1:25] Speaker 1: Goodyear is often described as a chemist, and I guess
[1:28] Speaker 1: you could say that it doesn't seem quite accurate to
[1:31] Speaker 1: me because he was not the kind of chemist who
[1:33] Speaker 1: was seeking to understand molecular science. He wasn't developing formulas.
[1:39] Speaker 1: We talked about so many people in that Raincode episode
[1:42] Speaker 1: who were also trying to figure these things out, like
[1:44] Speaker 1: how to make a stable, non sticky rubber, but they
[1:47] Speaker 1: operated so differently from Goodyear because he was just kind
[1:50] Speaker 1: of trying stuff out, seeing what worked, sometimes having an
[1:54] Speaker 1: accident and going can I replicate that, which sometimes happens
[1:57] Speaker 1: in science. But he really was kind of just like
[2:00] Speaker 1: trying things in the lab. He was not like a
[2:04] Speaker 1: heavy science dude and spoiler A learned. I feel like
[2:09] Speaker 1: I should also tell people this is not the most
[2:11] Speaker 1: upbeat story. There are some great moments where Goodyear gets
[2:15] Speaker 1: really excited about his work. You too, will likely become
[2:19] Speaker 1: frustrated with him in the course of this episode because
[2:22] Speaker 1: he made a lot of really dodgy decisions, and those
[2:25] Speaker 1: decisions often caused the people that he loved a whole
[2:27] Speaker 1: lot of suffering. In the process. So that's who we're
[2:30] Speaker 1: talking about today. So Charles Goodyear was born on December
[2:37] Speaker 1: twenty ninth, eighteen hundred, in New Haven, Connecticut, to Amasa
[2:41] Speaker 1: Goodyear and Cynthia Bateman Goodyear. Goodyear's family traced all the
[2:46] Speaker 1: way back to the founding of the New Haven colony.
[2:49] Speaker 1: Amasa was a merchant and owned a hardware store. The
[2:53] Speaker 1: family moved north to Naugatuck, Connecticut when Charles was very young,
[2:57] Speaker 1: and he spent his early life there. For some portion
[3:01] Speaker 1: of his youth, Charles, who was deeply religious, considered a
[3:05] Speaker 1: life in the clergy, although he did abandon that idea.
[3:09] Speaker 1: At seventeen, he moved to Philadelphia and he lived there
[3:12] Speaker 1: for four years and he worked as an apprentice in
[3:15] Speaker 1: another hardware store, and then at the end of that
[3:18] Speaker 1: four years, when he returned home to Connecticut, he became
[3:21] Speaker 1: business partners with his father, and their business became a Masa,
[3:25] Speaker 1: Goodyear and Son. The early work of this career that
[3:29] Speaker 1: Charles Goodyear was doing with his father's company gave very
[3:32] Speaker 1: little indication of the invention that would make Charles famous. Eventually,
[3:36] Speaker 1: they were known for their metal goods that A Masa
[3:39] Speaker 1: designed and manufactured, including everything from buttons to farm equipment.
[3:43] Speaker 1: So I guess in terms of ingenuity and inventiveness, maybe
[3:46] Speaker 1: it's a hint. A nineteen twelve book titled Leading American
[3:50] Speaker 1: Inventors claims that the Good Years were known especially for
[3:54] Speaker 1: making really good forks. That cracks me up, specifically forks.
[4:01] Speaker 1: You want to know where to get the best? Four
[4:02] Speaker 1: can down these guys Good Years. Several years into this work,
[4:08] Speaker 1: Charles got married to a woman named Clarissa Beecher. This
[4:11] Speaker 1: appears to have been a good match and a happy marriage,
[4:14] Speaker 1: despite the two of them having to get through a
[4:16] Speaker 1: lot of difficult times. They had seven children together. Yeah,
[4:22] Speaker 1: and I actually should say I had written that note
[4:25] Speaker 1: that Tracy just read about the number of children, that
[4:28] Speaker 1: there were a lot of children that Goodyear had and
[4:32] Speaker 1: they didn't all live. And I actually had a hard
[4:35] Speaker 1: time kind of untangling how many he had with Clarissa.
[4:40] Speaker 1: There's also a second wife that's going to come up
[4:42] Speaker 1: later on. So the seven. Take it with a grain
[4:46] Speaker 1: of salt, because I'm not one hundred percent the biography
[4:49] Speaker 1: that I read that said seven. I did not untangle
[4:53] Speaker 1: how they landed at that number, but they did have
[4:56] Speaker 1: many kids together, but before they went through the tough
[5:00] Speaker 1: times that Tracy just alluded to, there was actually a
[5:03] Speaker 1: period of prosperity. Charles and Clarissa moved to Philadelphia in
[5:08] Speaker 1: eighteen twenty six so that Charles could start his own
[5:10] Speaker 1: hardware store, and initially they did really well, but Charles
[5:15] Speaker 1: ran into financial problems. This will set the stage for
[5:19] Speaker 1: his entire life story. He often sold things on credit,
[5:22] Speaker 1: which a lot of merchants did, but it seems like
[5:25] Speaker 1: he was not very good at collecting payments. He also
[5:28] Speaker 1: gave credit to people who maybe didn't really have anything
[5:33] Speaker 1: to back that up, and he soon found out that
[5:35] Speaker 1: he could not keep up with his own debts, and
[5:37] Speaker 1: the business closed in eighteen thirty. This is one of
[5:41] Speaker 1: those things that's a little bit weird because in a
[5:43] Speaker 1: lot of write ups you will see about Goodyear, they
[5:46] Speaker 1: describe it as his father's business failing, and that confusion
[5:51] Speaker 1: may come from the fact that much of the stock
[5:53] Speaker 1: in Charles's store had actually come from his father, so
[5:57] Speaker 1: there was a connection between the two stores, but it
[6:00] Speaker 1: was Charles's own store that collapsed. According to that same
[6:04] Speaker 1: nineteen twelve book we just mentioned, Goodyear refused to declare
[6:08] Speaker 1: bankruptcy because he knew it would lead to the seizure
[6:11] Speaker 1: of all of his assets, including any intellectual property, and
[6:15] Speaker 1: because he and his father had come up with a
[6:18] Speaker 1: variety of metal things, he didn't want to lose his
[6:21] Speaker 1: rights to those. And the consequence is that he apparently
[6:25] Speaker 1: was in and out of debtors prison a lot throughout
[6:28] Speaker 1: his whole life. I was not able to confirm this
[6:32] Speaker 1: next bit to find hard documentation, although I did find
[6:37] Speaker 1: a nineteen thirty three notice in the United States Gazette
[6:40] Speaker 1: of Philadelphia that his home was being auctioned off by
[6:43] Speaker 1: the Sheriff's office, presumably as part of a default issue
[6:48] Speaker 1: with a loan. For a while the family was really
[6:51] Speaker 1: scraping by Clarissa was bringing in some money looming. Linen
[6:57] Speaker 1: and Charles also notes in his own writing that there
[7:00] Speaker 1: was a time during this period when their possessions were
[7:03] Speaker 1: sold at auction to meet their rental costs, and this
[7:07] Speaker 1: is something that would happen throughout his life. Goodyear later
[7:11] Speaker 1: explained how he came to view rubber as a potential
[7:14] Speaker 1: way out of his financial problems. He described in writing
[7:18] Speaker 1: how he visited the Roxbury, India Rubber Company in New
[7:22] Speaker 1: York to purchase a life preserver, but when he examined it,
[7:26] Speaker 1: he thought the rubber tube that was used to inflate
[7:29] Speaker 1: it could be improved. So he went home and he
[7:32] Speaker 1: worked on a new tube, and then he brought that
[7:34] Speaker 1: to the showroom. The person he spoke with thought that
[7:37] Speaker 1: the new tube was indeed an improvement, and that Goodyear
[7:41] Speaker 1: might be able to solve another bigger problem. He told
[7:45] Speaker 1: Goodyear that he should work on improving India rubber, and
[7:49] Speaker 1: that if he could, he would make a lot of money.
[7:51] Speaker 1: He also mentioned that a lot of other people had
[7:54] Speaker 1: tried and failed and lost a lot of money in
[7:57] Speaker 1: the process, and Goodyear later wrote of this moment when
[8:02] Speaker 1: he had this conversation in the third person, stating quote,
[8:06] Speaker 1: he was not before aware that the manufacturer was so
[8:09] Speaker 1: imperfectly understood. He was blessed with ignorance of the obstacles
[8:14] Speaker 1: which he had subsequently to encounter, but soon learned this much,
[8:18] Speaker 1: at least, that the difficulties which attended experiments with the substance,
[8:22] Speaker 1: if not unparalleled, were of an uncommon character. From the
[8:26] Speaker 1: fact that the experimenter as well as the manufacturer, was
[8:30] Speaker 1: obliged to wait the return of both warm and cold
[8:33] Speaker 1: weather at least twelve months and often longer before he
[8:36] Speaker 1: could know with any certainty that his articles would not
[8:39] Speaker 1: decompose or what were the results of his labors. So, yes,
[8:44] Speaker 1: there was this huge opportunity to turn his finances around,
[8:49] Speaker 1: but it was also going to require a significant investment
[8:52] Speaker 1: of time before any benefit would even be possible. But
[8:57] Speaker 1: Charles Goodyear also realized that quote that which which is
[9:00] Speaker 1: hidden and unknown and cannot be discovered by scientific research,
[9:04] Speaker 1: will most likely be discovered by accident, if at all,
[9:08] Speaker 1: and by the man who applies himself most perseveringly to
[9:11] Speaker 1: the subject and is most observing of everything relating there too.
[9:15] Speaker 1: Basically like, okay, science people can't do it, but I'm
[9:19] Speaker 1: just gonna keep trying. So he took on this challenge,
[9:23] Speaker 1: and the biggest initial challenge with India rubber was heat.
[9:28] Speaker 1: So natural rubber, which was called India rubber, had a
[9:31] Speaker 1: lot of problems and practical applications, like indigenous people who
[9:36] Speaker 1: live in places where these plants grow have been using
[9:39] Speaker 1: natural rubber for millennia, but when we're talking about like
[9:42] Speaker 1: manufactured products, there were issues. It could waterproof things, but
[9:50] Speaker 1: it also melted when it got hot, and it would
[9:52] Speaker 1: stick to other things, potentially making a huge mess. When
[9:56] Speaker 1: it melted, it would lose its shape and it didn't
[9:58] Speaker 1: snap back, and environments that were hotter than one hundred
[10:02] Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit, rubber quickly broke down completely. And it also
[10:05] Speaker 1: cracked in the cold, So something that was coated with
[10:09] Speaker 1: it for waterproofing would no longer be waterproof if it
[10:14] Speaker 1: got too cold. Problems with snowboots, for example, have cracked
[10:19] Speaker 1: rubber and wet feet. So if you had something coated
[10:23] Speaker 1: in India rubber, it had to have this ongoing upkeep
[10:26] Speaker 1: and re application to try to retain the benefits of
[10:29] Speaker 1: the rubber coating. Yeah, and as Tracy said, indigenous people
[10:33] Speaker 1: used it, but they kind of understood this and it
[10:35] Speaker 1: was part of their annual cycles to maintain their stuff
[10:38] Speaker 1: with it. Whereas to make things for manufacture, nobody wanted
[10:43] Speaker 1: to buy into a thing that you can not be
[10:44] Speaker 1: reach what a consumer product is about. We are going
[10:50] Speaker 1: to talk about what Charles Goodyear did right in his
[10:54] Speaker 1: early years of experimenting. After we paused for a sponsor break.
[11:07] Speaker 1: The start of Goodyear's success with rubber was in eighteen
[11:10] Speaker 1: thirty five, when he figured out how to manufacture gum
[11:13] Speaker 1: elastic that's just another name for natural rubber India rubber
[11:17] Speaker 1: into sheets. He added magnesium to gum rubber at a
[11:21] Speaker 1: one to one ratio, then added turpentine to liquefy it,
[11:25] Speaker 1: and then he spread that out onto marble with a
[11:28] Speaker 1: rolling pin. One account said he borrowed his wife's rolling
[11:31] Speaker 1: pin for the first batch. I don't know if that's true. Then,
[11:34] Speaker 1: according to his own account, he quote also commenced the
[11:38] Speaker 1: art of embossing on glazed cambrics, and he used these
[11:42] Speaker 1: sheets of rubber fabric to start making shoes, and these
[11:46] Speaker 1: were to be used for testing. These were not shoes
[11:48] Speaker 1: that were going right to consumers. And that's good because they,
[11:51] Speaker 1: like other rubber products, melted and stuck together in warm temperatures.
[11:57] Speaker 1: He eventually arrived at quote boiling. The article compounded with
[12:00] Speaker 1: magnesia in quicklime and water, which appeared to have the
[12:04] Speaker 1: effect of tanning the gum and destroying its viscous property.
[12:09] Speaker 1: So he thought he had managed to solve that melting problem.
[12:14] Speaker 1: By the end of eighteen thirty five, newspapers ran this
[12:17] Speaker 1: story quote, A discovery has been recently made by mister
[12:21] Speaker 1: Charles Goodyear, by which indiear rubber, after having been dissolved,
[12:25] Speaker 1: can be restored by a cheap process to its original whiteness,
[12:30] Speaker 1: and the pure gum be formed into a fabric that
[12:33] Speaker 1: can be used instead of cloth, leather, or parchment, and
[12:36] Speaker 1: can be molded into almost any form, and can also
[12:40] Speaker 1: be combined in a variety of ways with cloth, cordage,
[12:43] Speaker 1: and leather. Good Year won metals from the Mechanics Institute
[12:48] Speaker 1: and the American Institute that year for his rubber sheets.
[12:51] Speaker 1: But if those sheets were washed with anything acidic, like
[12:55] Speaker 1: even if someone put a little lemon juice in water
[12:58] Speaker 1: to wipe them down, the lime in them was neutralized
[13:02] Speaker 1: and they became sticky again. So in eighteen thirty six
[13:06] Speaker 1: he was back at work trying to figure out improvements,
[13:09] Speaker 1: and the solution was a little bit of an accident.
[13:12] Speaker 1: He had tried a number of things which were not working,
[13:15] Speaker 1: and then one day he boiled a piece of his
[13:17] Speaker 1: rubber fabric in lime with liquid bronze like the metal bronze,
[13:23] Speaker 1: and he was trying to coat this thing, but it
[13:26] Speaker 1: didn't coat the entire fabric in metal as he had hoped.
[13:29] Speaker 1: Some of it stuck, but some of it had just
[13:31] Speaker 1: slid off, and so then he tried to get the
[13:35] Speaker 1: bronze that had it here to the fabric off using
[13:38] Speaker 1: nitric acid, but that just made this ugly mess. There
[13:42] Speaker 1: was discoloration, and he threw that sample out, thinking that
[13:45] Speaker 1: whole plan was trashed. But then a few days later
[13:49] Speaker 1: he pulled it out of the garbage and examined it,
[13:52] Speaker 1: and he found that while it was still pliant in
[13:55] Speaker 1: the areas where he had used nitric acid, it wasn't
[13:57] Speaker 1: sticky at all. He recreated this accidental treatment with good results,
[14:02] Speaker 1: and then he developed a process for it, which he
[14:05] Speaker 1: called the acid gas process, and he patented his new
[14:08] Speaker 1: rubber sheets that were made this way. He also designed
[14:12] Speaker 1: a number of products using the sheets, and he was
[14:14] Speaker 1: soon manufacturing those things thanks to a friend, William Ballard,
[14:18] Speaker 1: who was willing to invest in Charles Goodyear. Feel like
[14:21] Speaker 1: he's the first of many friends who foolishly invested in
[14:24] Speaker 1: Charles Goods. Here In fact, all of his work had
[14:29] Speaker 1: been possible due to Goodyear's friends being really generous with him,
[14:33] Speaker 1: from loaning him workspace to actually giving him money. And
[14:38] Speaker 1: it soured some of those friendships as Goodyear worked through
[14:42] Speaker 1: multiple expensive failures, but Goodyear and Ballard also failed, and
[14:48] Speaker 1: this time it was by no fault of Goodyear. Ballard
[14:51] Speaker 1: ran into his own financial hardships in the events that
[14:54] Speaker 1: led up to the Panic of eighteen thirty seven, and
[14:56] Speaker 1: he declared bankruptcy the company folded. Through all of his
[15:01] Speaker 1: ups and downs, Goodyear remained fairly upbeat, and he even
[15:05] Speaker 1: made fun of himself. He included an anecdote in his
[15:09] Speaker 1: writing about the development of rubber that he wrote decades
[15:13] Speaker 1: later about how he was always wearing things that were
[15:16] Speaker 1: made from rubber sheeting. These were often made by his wife, Clarissa.
[15:20] Speaker 1: This was in part to show what it could do,
[15:22] Speaker 1: and also because they didn't have other things to make
[15:25] Speaker 1: clothes out of. And when someone asked one of his
[15:28] Speaker 1: friends how he would recognize Charles Goodyear if he met him,
[15:31] Speaker 1: the reply was, quote, if you meet a man who
[15:33] Speaker 1: has on an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and
[15:37] Speaker 1: shoes with an India rubber money purse without a cent
[15:40] Speaker 1: of money in it, that is he. Goodyear continued on
[15:44] Speaker 1: his own making rubber shoes and housewares as almost the
[15:48] Speaker 1: cottage industry, but he wasn't able to sell much. One
[15:52] Speaker 1: of the problems was that rubber had developed a bad reputation,
[15:56] Speaker 1: as Goodyear and other innovators had put rubber items to
[16:00] Speaker 1: market in eighteen thirty five and eighteen thirty six. A
[16:03] Speaker 1: rubber craze had driven a lot of people to purchase
[16:06] Speaker 1: rubberized items, only to discover that those items had problems,
[16:12] Speaker 1: So people were not as keen to buy stuff made
[16:14] Speaker 1: out of rubber, and retailers were also not that interested
[16:17] Speaker 1: in stocking rubber products honestly understandably, Goodyear regrouped, moved the
[16:25] Speaker 1: family back to New Haven, Connecticut, where they lived with
[16:27] Speaker 1: his parents, and he focused exclusively on waterproof shoes, and
[16:31] Speaker 1: he actually did okay for a while. He wasn't flush
[16:35] Speaker 1: with cash, but he was able to support his family.
[16:39] Speaker 1: Goodyear also met another man who worked in rubber named
[16:42] Speaker 1: Nathaniel Hayward during this period, and Hayward had figured out
[16:46] Speaker 1: a method of combining India rubber with sulfur and curing
[16:49] Speaker 1: it in the sun, and the result was a non
[16:52] Speaker 1: sticky rubber. Goodyear purchased Hayward's patent in eighteen thirty nine,
[16:57] Speaker 1: and he also hired Hayward to work with him Hayward
[17:00] Speaker 1: became his assistant. The sulfur treated rubber had the complete
[17:04] Speaker 1: nonstick finish that goodyear was after, but it came with
[17:08] Speaker 1: other problems. He started making all kinds of things with
[17:12] Speaker 1: this sun cured sulfur method, and he got a massive
[17:15] Speaker 1: and important order when the US Postal Service commissioned him
[17:19] Speaker 1: to make mail bags. And he made those bags and
[17:22] Speaker 1: he turned out really, really well. He had treated them
[17:25] Speaker 1: with chrome, lead and vermilion to make a faux leather finish.
[17:29] Speaker 1: This was something he was experimenting with a lot at
[17:31] Speaker 1: the time, and in his writing he stated quote being
[17:34] Speaker 1: desirous to beautify the fabrics with a variety of colors.
[17:38] Speaker 1: The writer used metallic and other colors indiscriminately for this purpose.
[17:44] Speaker 1: He treated the mail bags and then he hung them
[17:46] Speaker 1: in his workshop while he went away on vacation, And
[17:49] Speaker 1: when he got home, those bags were in piles on
[17:52] Speaker 1: the floor. The material was breaking down, and it also
[17:55] Speaker 1: smelled horrible. The rubber was rotting. He had not just
[17:59] Speaker 1: been making the mail bags this way. He'd also made
[18:03] Speaker 1: home goods and life preservers, and they had been selling.
[18:07] Speaker 1: And he had also been crowing to all of his
[18:09] Speaker 1: friends about his big government contract, and now people's stuff
[18:14] Speaker 1: was falling apart. He had a lot of angry consumers
[18:17] Speaker 1: and no mail bags to deliver on that contract. He wrote,
[18:21] Speaker 1: quote again, he saw those dear to him, together with
[18:24] Speaker 1: his aged parents, stripped of the comforts with which they
[18:28] Speaker 1: were surrounded. Everything that he possessed was brought to the
[18:31] Speaker 1: hammer for the discharge of private bills. Goodyear described this
[18:36] Speaker 1: as a time of serious misfortune in his life. He
[18:39] Speaker 1: was completely broke. He knew that he had alienated people,
[18:43] Speaker 1: describing himself as quote being justly debarred the sympathy of others.
[18:49] Speaker 1: A lot of people told him that he should give
[18:51] Speaker 1: up on rubber and go back to the hardware business.
[18:54] Speaker 1: She did not do that. Instead, he tried to figure
[18:57] Speaker 1: out exactly what had gone wrong with the process, and
[19:01] Speaker 1: he believed it was the colorants. His process had been
[19:04] Speaker 1: working perfectly on sheets of rubber, but these mail bags
[19:08] Speaker 1: and other new products that had failed were thicker, and
[19:11] Speaker 1: it seemed that the sun curing process just couldn't reach
[19:14] Speaker 1: the deeper layers of thicker items, so they weren't curing
[19:18] Speaker 1: all the way through. But though this whole ordeal would
[19:22] Speaker 1: probably destroy most people and he did seem to have
[19:25] Speaker 1: been in a downward spiral briefly, she bounced back kind
[19:29] Speaker 1: of quickly when something else caught his attention. He wrote
[19:31] Speaker 1: that he quote had hardly time enough to realize the
[19:35] Speaker 1: extent of his embarrassment before he became intently engaged with
[19:39] Speaker 1: another experiment and his mind buoyant with new hopes and expectations, which,
[19:44] Speaker 1: as it afterwards proved, were to be for the time
[19:47] Speaker 1: at least more than realized. In our episode about the
[19:51] Speaker 1: invention of the raincoat, we mentioned that it's often said
[19:54] Speaker 1: that the discovery of vulcanization was kind of an accident,
[19:57] Speaker 1: and that's true, although not in quite the way that
[20:00] Speaker 1: we said In that episode, that was sort of a
[20:02] Speaker 1: brief mention. It didn't get the kind of deeper dive
[20:04] Speaker 1: that today's episode is getting. So we know now how
[20:09] Speaker 1: things played out, at least according to Goodyear's account. He
[20:14] Speaker 1: stated that he was visiting a factory in Wourren and
[20:18] Speaker 1: he brought a sample of some of the compound that
[20:21] Speaker 1: had failed in the mailbags. According to him, the sample quote,
[20:25] Speaker 1: being carelessly brought in contact with a hot stove charred
[20:28] Speaker 1: like leather, so it didn't melt Goodyear described calling out
[20:33] Speaker 1: to his brother and some of the other people around
[20:35] Speaker 1: to point out how interesting this was, but it sounds
[20:39] Speaker 1: like they had kind of had enough of him getting
[20:41] Speaker 1: excited about things and then having them fall apart, so
[20:45] Speaker 1: nobody really paid much attention. But Goodyear really felt like
[20:49] Speaker 1: he had identified something important. His accident made him believe
[20:54] Speaker 1: that high temperature applied to a treated piece of rubber
[20:57] Speaker 1: cloth could potentially remove all of its stickiness if he
[21:01] Speaker 1: could just get the temperature and the exposure to it right.
[21:05] Speaker 1: So he started a series of experiments. He found that
[21:09] Speaker 1: if he heated sulfur to boiling, which is like hundreds
[21:13] Speaker 1: and hundreds and hundreds of degrees that you have to reach,
[21:17] Speaker 1: he could put India rubber in it and the rubber
[21:20] Speaker 1: would not melt and it would emerge intact, soft and pliable.
[21:24] Speaker 1: He also tried exposing treated fabric to fire and found
[21:28] Speaker 1: that it did not melt, but it charred as it
[21:30] Speaker 1: had done it in his accident at the factory. Once
[21:33] Speaker 1: he had proof of concept, he was all in on
[21:36] Speaker 1: his new process, and he spent several months testing it.
[21:40] Speaker 1: He tested a variety of different heat sources, and as
[21:43] Speaker 1: he refined he ran processes over and over to ensure
[21:46] Speaker 1: the results were consistent. The rubber he produced did not
[21:50] Speaker 1: break down in high temperatures, and as for cold One
[21:54] Speaker 1: of his daughters described seeing him nail a piece of
[21:56] Speaker 1: his treated rubber outside one evening before a cold night,
[22:00] Speaker 1: and then retrieved it in the morning, and he was
[22:02] Speaker 1: elated to find that it was still flexible and it
[22:05] Speaker 1: had not cracked, so he had figured out vulcanization. He
[22:10] Speaker 1: also gave the process that name after the Roman god
[22:13] Speaker 1: of fire. So at this point, after all of that,
[22:16] Speaker 1: this was a thoroughly tested process that addressed the problems
[22:20] Speaker 1: that everybody was having with the production of rubber, and
[22:23] Speaker 1: it addressed all of the problems that Goodyear had had
[22:26] Speaker 1: with his own mail bags and other products. But just
[22:29] Speaker 1: as his brother and colleagues had really not wanted to
[22:32] Speaker 1: hear it when Charles noticed his sample not melting in
[22:37] Speaker 1: that earlier incident, the consumer market was really not interested
[22:42] Speaker 1: in vulcanized rubber. In addition to the problems with reliability
[22:46] Speaker 1: of rubber products in general, Goodyear's failures were well known.
[22:51] Speaker 1: On top of those two problems, the idea of home
[22:55] Speaker 1: wayer Goods was seen as a novelty. He needed to
[22:57] Speaker 1: produce something bigger if he was going to really get
[23:00] Speaker 1: a large scale buy in from a company or a
[23:03] Speaker 1: government contract. And then there was the really big obstacle.
[23:07] Speaker 1: All of the items he had vulcanized were processed in
[23:11] Speaker 1: very small setups in Goodyear's home or in workshops where
[23:14] Speaker 1: he was borrowing time. He just couldn't produce anything at
[23:19] Speaker 1: scale to show that he had really figured things out
[23:22] Speaker 1: this time. The rest of Goodyear's life was like an
[23:26] Speaker 1: unending roller coaster ride, and not in a good way.
[23:30] Speaker 1: We'll get into it after we hear from the sponsors.
[23:32] Speaker 1: They keep the show going. During this time in Charles
[23:45] Speaker 1: Goodyear's life, when he was perfecting vulcanization, his family was
[23:49] Speaker 1: really struggling. In the winter of eighteen thirty nine to
[23:53] Speaker 1: eighteen forty, there was a very heavy snowstorm and the
[23:56] Speaker 1: Goodyears were trapped in their home with no fuel to
[23:59] Speaker 1: war and no food to eat. And remember he had
[24:03] Speaker 1: quite a few kids. Charles said that he was sick,
[24:07] Speaker 1: but that he walked through the storm to the house
[24:09] Speaker 1: of a man named Obie Coolidge looking for help. This
[24:12] Speaker 1: was a person who's kind of like a neighbor. They
[24:14] Speaker 1: had said high on the street once or twice, but
[24:17] Speaker 1: they didn't really know each other, and according to Goodyear,
[24:20] Speaker 1: he explained to Coolidge the situation he was in, including
[24:24] Speaker 1: the work he had been doing in the previous years,
[24:26] Speaker 1: and Coolidge not only gave him help with the family's
[24:29] Speaker 1: immediate needs to get them warmed and fed, he also
[24:34] Speaker 1: backed Goodyear financially for continued work, giving him additional funds
[24:39] Speaker 1: to sustain his efforts. Goodyear was working at the time
[24:43] Speaker 1: to create what he described as quote a set of
[24:46] Speaker 1: military equipments for specimens, with the intention of vulcanizing them
[24:51] Speaker 1: as soon as an apparatus could be obtained for the purpose.
[24:55] Speaker 1: But once again his luck tanked because before he could
[24:59] Speaker 1: vulcanize these items, the rubber fermented and they fell apart.
[25:03] Speaker 1: He had lost an entire winter's worth of work. He
[25:07] Speaker 1: talked the experience up to a learning opportunity, recognizing that
[25:11] Speaker 1: he could not mix natural rubber with a solvent and
[25:14] Speaker 1: then compound it with lead and sulfur unless he was
[25:17] Speaker 1: ready to vulcanize that right away. Finally, there was a
[25:22] Speaker 1: potential breakthrough, but it wasn't in the way that Goodyear anticipated.
[25:27] Speaker 1: He was approached by a French firm called Ratier in
[25:30] Speaker 1: Gibas to license his acid gas process, but he didn't
[25:34] Speaker 1: want to give it to them because he felt like
[25:37] Speaker 1: he was so close to large scale vulcanization and that
[25:40] Speaker 1: it would be a far better process for them to license.
[25:44] Speaker 1: This is really frustrating to read about because he continued
[25:47] Speaker 1: to put his family in peril by saying no, no,
[25:50] Speaker 1: just wait a little longer. When his two year old
[25:54] Speaker 1: son was dangerously ill because he had not taken this contract,
[25:58] Speaker 1: Goodyear wrote to a friend for hell and he got
[26:01] Speaker 1: back seven dollars and a letter chastising him for not
[26:05] Speaker 1: taking some sort of stable work to support his family.
[26:09] Speaker 1: With money borrowed from relatives, Goodyear took some of his
[26:13] Speaker 1: small home vulcanized items to New York and then once
[26:17] Speaker 1: again got funding, this time from a man named William Ryder.
[26:21] Speaker 1: This enabled Goodyear to set up a large scale facility
[26:24] Speaker 1: in Springfield, Massachusetts, and he started to gain some momentum.
[26:28] Speaker 1: He started getting orders for goods and he was getting
[26:31] Speaker 1: the business in decent shape when he got hit with
[26:34] Speaker 1: another bit of bad fortune. He landed in debtors jail again.
[26:38] Speaker 1: He was thirty five thousand dollars in the hull, and
[26:41] Speaker 1: people were filing claims against him, but this time he
[26:46] Speaker 1: took the option of declaring bankruptcy to get out of
[26:48] Speaker 1: that situation. Even so, once he was free from prison,
[26:51] Speaker 1: he continued to work until the debts he had were
[26:54] Speaker 1: all paid off. Shockingly, that only took a few months.
[26:58] Speaker 1: Yeah that French company and others did start to get
[27:02] Speaker 1: licensed deals with him, and that helped him really get
[27:05] Speaker 1: to a much more stable financial footing for a while.
[27:09] Speaker 1: The eighteen forties started with great promise, although Goodyear was
[27:12] Speaker 1: not entirely satisfied with the vulcanization process when it came
[27:16] Speaker 1: to fabric, which was really one of the big applications
[27:19] Speaker 1: of it. And the problem was that the fabrics that
[27:22] Speaker 1: Goodyear was adhering his vulcanized rubber to just didn't always
[27:25] Speaker 1: stay at here. He tried a lot of different kinds
[27:28] Speaker 1: of fabrics and they all had this problem. He spent
[27:31] Speaker 1: a lot of time year solving this problem, and it
[27:34] Speaker 1: ultimately saw Goodyear abandoning this idea of adhering the rubber
[27:38] Speaker 1: to fabric and instead directly mixing cotton fibers into his
[27:43] Speaker 1: India rubber in its liquid form. Before he'd laid it
[27:46] Speaker 1: out flat and vulcanized it, and this basically created an
[27:50] Speaker 1: entirely new fabric. Additionally, Goodyear did not really want to
[27:54] Speaker 1: run a factory. He was intent on licenses serving as
[27:58] Speaker 1: his income. But it took kind of a weird path
[28:01] Speaker 1: to try to get there, because he kept inventing uses
[28:05] Speaker 1: for vulcanized rubber and then building prototypes not to put
[28:09] Speaker 1: these items into production, just to show that this could
[28:12] Speaker 1: be done. This was a very expensive way to do business,
[28:17] Speaker 1: and he had taken so much time trying to perfect
[28:19] Speaker 1: things that other chemists were now able to develop their
[28:23] Speaker 1: own processes before he finally got a patent for vulcanization
[28:26] Speaker 1: in eighteen forty four. That led to legal issues down
[28:30] Speaker 1: the road. Yeah, we will talk about another patent holder
[28:33] Speaker 1: in just a moment. His next goal was to showcase
[28:37] Speaker 1: his inventions at world expositions. He spent years preparing to
[28:42] Speaker 1: exhibit at the eighteen fifty one Great Exhibition in London,
[28:45] Speaker 1: where he showed off vulcanization at frequent flyer on our
[28:48] Speaker 1: show The Crystal Palace. He won a medal for his efforts.
[28:51] Speaker 1: People really did recognize he had figured out a pretty
[28:54] Speaker 1: cool thing. But even as he was still celebrating his triumph,
[28:58] Speaker 1: he found himself in broiled in one legal battle after another.
[29:03] Speaker 1: In eighteen fifty two, he sued Horace Day for patent infringement,
[29:07] Speaker 1: and he actually hired Daniel Webster to represent him. That
[29:11] Speaker 1: was apparently very expensive. I saw one thing that claimed
[29:13] Speaker 1: that he paid Daniel Webster ten thousand dollars for that.
[29:17] Speaker 1: In eighteen fifty one, he did win the suit, and
[29:20] Speaker 1: he celebrated by taking the entire family to Europe. There
[29:25] Speaker 1: was some business in hand on that trip. Charles McIntosh,
[29:28] Speaker 1: the inventor of the raincoat, had a business partner named
[29:32] Speaker 1: Thomas Hancock. Hancock had patented his method for vulcanization, which
[29:37] Speaker 1: also used sulfur in Britain, at the same time that
[29:40] Speaker 1: Goodyear was getting his patent. Goodyear, no doubt, feeling confident
[29:45] Speaker 1: after the whole Horace Day verdict, intended to sue on
[29:48] Speaker 1: the grounds that Hancock had copied him. McIntosh, undoubtedly wanting
[29:54] Speaker 1: to keep his company out of any kind of legal mess,
[29:56] Speaker 1: tried to smooth things over and offered to give Goodyear
[29:59] Speaker 1: one half of the patent that Hancock held if Charles
[30:03] Speaker 1: would just drop his legal action. Goodyear refused, and later
[30:08] Speaker 1: he must have regretted this because he lost his case.
[30:11] Speaker 1: He could have had half of the British rights, but
[30:14] Speaker 1: then he returned home with nothing other than a big
[30:17] Speaker 1: legal bill. Yeah, there are many versions of the good
[30:22] Speaker 1: Year story that kind of tell his life story in
[30:24] Speaker 1: parallel to Hancock. And there is the possibility that Hancock
[30:29] Speaker 1: had gotten there's like an apocryphal story that he got
[30:32] Speaker 1: a piece of rubber that Goodyear had worked on and
[30:36] Speaker 1: he smelled sulfur on it and that led him to
[30:38] Speaker 1: his version. But we don't know that for sure. But
[30:42] Speaker 1: Goodyear made one bad decision after another, including going no, no,
[30:46] Speaker 1: I don't need all the money that you're gonna make.
[30:48] Speaker 1: That's fine, I'll make it all. And he didn't make
[30:50] Speaker 1: any The bad luck also continued. Clarissa Goodyear's wife of
[30:55] Speaker 1: almost thirty years at that point, died in March of
[30:58] Speaker 1: eighteen fifty three. He did remarry a year later to
[31:02] Speaker 1: a woman from London named Fanny Wardell. In the months
[31:06] Speaker 1: after Clarissa's death, Goodyear wrote and published his own account
[31:10] Speaker 1: of his life and work, titled gum Elastic and Its Varieties,
[31:14] Speaker 1: with a detailed account of its applications and uses, and
[31:17] Speaker 1: of the discovery of vulcanization. This book definitely reads as
[31:22] Speaker 1: though one of its goals is to establish Goodyear as
[31:25] Speaker 1: the inventor of vulcanized rubber. He opens the book, which
[31:29] Speaker 1: is more than five hundred pages long, with quote. The
[31:32] Speaker 1: writer finds himself so identified with the subject that he
[31:36] Speaker 1: deems it impossible to give a correct history of the
[31:39] Speaker 1: recent inventions in gum elastic without alluding to himself oftener
[31:44] Speaker 1: than he could wish by speaking of the trials and
[31:47] Speaker 1: discouragements which he had to encounter during the first seven
[31:51] Speaker 1: years of his experiments. In this writing, Goodyear goes right
[31:56] Speaker 1: to the basics. He talks about the Ficus elastica and
[31:59] Speaker 1: the West world's access to it. That's the tree that
[32:02] Speaker 1: it comes from, noting that while it grows in numerous regions,
[32:06] Speaker 1: its accessibility and cheaper cost in India at the time
[32:10] Speaker 1: resulted in most of it being sourced from there. And
[32:13] Speaker 1: he describes the process of getting the milky rubbery kouchuk
[32:17] Speaker 1: from the plant and processing it for use in various
[32:21] Speaker 1: forms that happened from the seventeen hundreds on. He compares
[32:25] Speaker 1: it and its uses to other substances like bitumen and
[32:29] Speaker 1: gud apercha. He walks the reader through the problems of
[32:32] Speaker 1: early rubber, which he calls gum or gum elastic. Quote.
[32:36] Speaker 1: In the early attempts to manufacture the gum in the
[32:39] Speaker 1: United States, it was found that no kind except that
[32:42] Speaker 1: which had been cured could be manufactured in any way
[32:45] Speaker 1: into goods that would not in a very short time decompose.
[32:50] Speaker 1: He noted that the way India prepped it for export
[32:53] Speaker 1: was part of the problem, and he hoped that they
[32:55] Speaker 1: would shift their methods as the global rubber industry grew
[32:59] Speaker 1: and more countries started making their own rubber supply available.
[33:03] Speaker 1: He also recognizes in this writing that, due to his
[33:06] Speaker 1: own advancements as well as those of others, the applications
[33:10] Speaker 1: that were making use of rubber were rapidly expanding. He
[33:13] Speaker 1: wrote about this in a way which evidences a racist
[33:17] Speaker 1: bias as well. He wrote, quote, the certainty that there
[33:20] Speaker 1: will in future be a very great consumption of the
[33:22] Speaker 1: various kinds of India rubber and waterproof gums has caused
[33:26] Speaker 1: a good deal of apprehension with many as to the supply,
[33:30] Speaker 1: and it is asked, where is it to come from?
[33:32] Speaker 1: Will there not be a scarcity. It is true that,
[33:35] Speaker 1: owing to the sudden and rapid extension of the manufacture,
[33:39] Speaker 1: together with some commercial speculation in the article, the price
[33:43] Speaker 1: has for the present year eighteen fifty one been unusually high.
[33:47] Speaker 1: So he started writing this couple years before it came out, apparently,
[33:51] Speaker 1: but this is a state of things which will not continue.
[33:54] Speaker 1: The supply is literally inexhaustible. There is a belt of
[33:58] Speaker 1: forest trees extending ten degrees each side of the equator
[34:02] Speaker 1: around the globe, which yield these gums of various kinds,
[34:06] Speaker 1: and has been the case with turpentine and resin the
[34:09] Speaker 1: greater the demand, the cheaper. In all probability, these substances
[34:13] Speaker 1: will be when once the attention of mankind is turned
[34:16] Speaker 1: to the subject, and that which is already being done
[34:19] Speaker 1: enterprising civilized races engage in the business of collecting it,
[34:24] Speaker 1: instead of relying on one tribe of Indians on a
[34:26] Speaker 1: single river, there will no longer be any solicitude on
[34:30] Speaker 1: the score of supply. The year after his second wedding,
[34:34] Speaker 1: Goodyear was back in Europe for another world's fair, the
[34:37] Speaker 1: Exposition Universal of Paris of eighteen fifty five. He spent
[34:42] Speaker 1: a lot of money on this effort, and reported fifty
[34:45] Speaker 1: thousand dollars. He spent so much money over the course
[34:49] Speaker 1: of the fair. While he was in France, he once
[34:51] Speaker 1: ran into money issues and ended up in a French
[34:54] Speaker 1: debtors prison. It sometimes reported that he received the French
[34:58] Speaker 1: legion of Hotter Metal while in prison, but Holly could
[35:01] Speaker 1: not find him in the legion of Honor registry Nope.
[35:07] Speaker 1: Once he was released from Debtors prison in France, Goodyear,
[35:10] Speaker 1: who had a long history of dyspepsia, was quite sick.
[35:14] Speaker 1: He's often described as having a variety of ailments, but
[35:17] Speaker 1: what they are is a little bit unclear. But he
[35:20] Speaker 1: was sick enough at this point that he thought he
[35:22] Speaker 1: was dying, and he actually sent letters to his friends
[35:25] Speaker 1: and family saying so and basically telling them goodbye. He
[35:29] Speaker 1: and Fanny traveled from France to Bath, England, and he
[35:33] Speaker 1: stayed there until eighteen fifty eight, so several years, as
[35:36] Speaker 1: his wife took care of him. He returned to the
[35:39] Speaker 1: US in May eighteen fifty eight, having pawned his wife's
[35:43] Speaker 1: jewelry to pay for that voyage. His business was a mess,
[35:48] Speaker 1: but he was able to get his patent extended for
[35:51] Speaker 1: seven years and that offered a fairly decent income. Goodyear
[35:56] Speaker 1: used the money he was bringing in to set up
[35:58] Speaker 1: a new home in Washington, d c. In eighteen sixty,
[36:02] Speaker 1: he learned that his daughter Cynthia was dying in Connecticut,
[36:05] Speaker 1: and he immediately set off by steamer to see her,
[36:09] Speaker 1: leaving Fanny and their five day old new daughter at home.
[36:13] Speaker 1: When this ship docked in New York, Goodyear was exhausted
[36:16] Speaker 1: from days of seasickness, and he was also met with
[36:19] Speaker 1: the news that Cynthia had already died. Goodyear was so
[36:23] Speaker 1: stricken that he could not continue on to Connecticut, and
[36:26] Speaker 1: he was taken to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Fanny hurried
[36:30] Speaker 1: to meet him there after being notified that he was
[36:33] Speaker 1: on his deathbed. He lived for several weeks after this
[36:37] Speaker 1: and died on July first, at the age of fifty nine.
[36:40] Speaker 1: Goodyear unsurprisingly left a massive debt behind, totaling right around
[36:46] Speaker 1: two hundred thousand dollars. His son, Charles Junior, much better
[36:50] Speaker 1: with money than his father, settled his outstanding debts and
[36:54] Speaker 1: using the remaining money due through patent licensing, was able
[36:58] Speaker 1: to set up a fund to take care of Goodyear's
[37:01] Speaker 1: remaining dependent family. When the patents expired in eighteen sixty five,
[37:06] Speaker 1: Charles Junior sold the rights to the Goodyear name. Charles
[37:10] Speaker 1: Goodyear's life was so full of ups and downs, and
[37:13] Speaker 1: he was obviously a driven man and even a visionary
[37:17] Speaker 1: of sorts, but the task of managing businesses related to
[37:21] Speaker 1: his ideas was something he never got the hang of.
[37:25] Speaker 1: He wrote of the hardship of being an inventor in
[37:28] Speaker 1: this way quote he takes the precaution to procure letters
[37:32] Speaker 1: patent for his invention, which he counts as property, but
[37:35] Speaker 1: which amounts chiefly to this that the government grants him
[37:39] Speaker 1: permission to fight his own battles. Next comes the herculean
[37:43] Speaker 1: task of convincing the public of the advantages of the improvement,
[37:48] Speaker 1: and yet the more difficult one of supplying the market
[37:51] Speaker 1: with the improvement himself, and of preventing others from doing
[37:55] Speaker 1: it by encroaching on his patent. If his object is
[37:59] Speaker 1: to derived I have a prophet by disposing of his
[38:02] Speaker 1: patents for his inventions. It is well known that patents
[38:05] Speaker 1: are so commonly evaded in some way, and that the
[38:08] Speaker 1: patent law is so ineffectual for their protection, that the
[38:12] Speaker 1: public will not value them highly, if at all. Incidentally,
[38:18] Speaker 1: if you're thinking, yeah, but there's a Goodyear company that
[38:21] Speaker 1: still exists today that was not started by Charles Goodyear
[38:25] Speaker 1: or any of his descendants, although the name is inspired
[38:28] Speaker 1: by his work. That company was founded in eighteen ninety eight,
[38:32] Speaker 1: so almost forty years after Charles Goodyear died by a
[38:35] Speaker 1: man named Frank Sieberling. Okay. Did not know that me
[38:42] Speaker 1: either until I was working on this. Do you have
[38:46] Speaker 1: some listener mail? I do. I have so many thoughts
[38:48] Speaker 1: about Charles Goodyear. Can't wait for Friday. I have a
[38:51] Speaker 1: listener mail from Teresa or Teresa who writes, Hello, ladies.
[38:55] Speaker 1: I just finished your episode on the UFITZI Gallery and
[38:58] Speaker 1: it had everything international travel, well art, history, restoration. Michael
[39:02] Speaker 1: Kiboman quotes labor protests. What prompted me to write was
[39:06] Speaker 1: the date of the event. An event that happened in
[39:08] Speaker 1: my own lifetime always makes me feel old, sure, but
[39:11] Speaker 1: also brings me back to some questions I liked discussing
[39:14] Speaker 1: with my high school students when I used to teach
[39:17] Speaker 1: the history unit for a class called Theory of Knowledge.
[39:20] Speaker 1: When does an event become history versus current events? What
[39:24] Speaker 1: is worth preserving, whether physically or through story. Is the
[39:28] Speaker 1: passage of time helpful or detrimental for creating a more
[39:31] Speaker 1: accurate understanding of the past. Theory of knowledge is a
[39:35] Speaker 1: required course for kids in the International Baccalaureate Program IB
[39:38] Speaker 1: for short, and for a student in IB to write
[39:41] Speaker 1: a history essay, they are required to write on something
[39:44] Speaker 1: at least ten years in the past. The election of
[39:47] Speaker 1: twenty sixteen could now be considered history, as if the
[39:50] Speaker 1: nineteen nineties being history isn't weird enough. I would love
[39:53] Speaker 1: to hear your discussion on this. I no longer teach,
[39:56] Speaker 1: but work in education policy, trying to make teaching better
[39:59] Speaker 1: for teas teachers. I appreciate every single time you give
[40:02] Speaker 1: a shout out to the teachers on your show. This
[40:04] Speaker 1: episode had that too. I'll do it again. Thank you educators.
[40:09] Speaker 1: Since I've included pet tax in previous emails and I
[40:12] Speaker 1: know you like art. Attached are some of my artworks
[40:14] Speaker 1: featuring my pets, Raku, the Great Pyrenees border Collie mix,
[40:18] Speaker 1: Ruby the super mutt are in the paper cutout Christmas card,
[40:21] Speaker 1: and Treyla, the very cute but often evil eldercat in
[40:24] Speaker 1: the form of a felted toy partially made with her
[40:27] Speaker 1: actual fur. Thank you for all your work and amazing
[40:29] Speaker 1: stories you share with us every week. I love this
[40:33] Speaker 1: email because it brings up a thing that we talk
[40:36] Speaker 1: about on the show sometimes. Yeah, but we haven't in
[40:39] Speaker 1: a minute, and I think it's worth looking at. We
[40:42] Speaker 1: don't have a hard rule. We have ruleish kind of like,
[40:46] Speaker 1: usually we don't do stuff that's like after I don't know, sixties,
[40:51] Speaker 1: seventies usually, Yeah. Occasionally we've done something that's been more
[40:57] Speaker 1: into the eighties, usually something that was not such big
[41:01] Speaker 1: news in the eighties that are listeners of a comparable
[41:05] Speaker 1: age to us would have huge memories of it. So
[41:10] Speaker 1: the bombing part of the UFC episode was like more
[41:13] Speaker 1: recent than we typically talk about. Yeah. And the logic
[41:18] Speaker 1: for me of that, and what often happens in anything
[41:21] Speaker 1: that we end up talking about that is more like
[41:24] Speaker 1: eighties or in this case nineties, is that it ties
[41:27] Speaker 1: to something much older. Yeah. And so for me, I
[41:31] Speaker 1: talked about at the beginning of that episode that what
[41:32] Speaker 1: got me was that picture of the or not that
[41:35] Speaker 1: picture that that impression left by a window that they
[41:38] Speaker 1: leave in one of the vaulted ceilings in the ufize,
[41:41] Speaker 1: but it really like what got me really excited was
[41:44] Speaker 1: looking at how they're trying to preserve history that was lost, right,
[41:49] Speaker 1: And so that gave us an opportunity to talk about art,
[41:53] Speaker 1: which I always wanted to do, and Bartolomeo Manfredi and
[41:55] Speaker 1: like a little Caravaggio in there, which is also something
[41:58] Speaker 1: I love talking about. So it's kind of like a
[42:01] Speaker 1: through line that brings us to that moment in the nineties,
[42:04] Speaker 1: which is very pivotal to the story and that you know,
[42:07] Speaker 1: I try to give as much information as possible within
[42:10] Speaker 1: the confines of our show, right, but it has to
[42:13] Speaker 1: connect usually to something that happened much earlier than that
[42:17] Speaker 1: for us to walk you through those decades. Yeah, there's
[42:21] Speaker 1: not a like, there's not a hard and fast rule
[42:24] Speaker 1: of when something becomes history. I'm a big fan of
[42:28] Speaker 1: the ask Historians subreddit, which is one of the best
[42:33] Speaker 1: moderated communities on Reddit. If you're like, ah, I read it.
[42:38] Speaker 1: They their mobs are on top of it, and they
[42:40] Speaker 1: have rules about what is appropriate to both post and comment.
[42:45] Speaker 1: And if I'm remembering correctly, their rule is a twenty
[42:49] Speaker 1: year rule, because that is sort of what they have
[42:51] Speaker 1: come to feel like is an appropriate amount, Like you
[42:54] Speaker 1: have enough remove from the thing happening after twenty years
[42:58] Speaker 1: to look back on it, and you could make arguments
[43:02] Speaker 1: for amounts of time longer or shorter than that, but
[43:05] Speaker 1: that's sort of where they have arrived. And that has
[43:08] Speaker 1: also meant that when a twentieth anniversary of big big
[43:12] Speaker 1: things are coming up, they have to kind of like
[43:14] Speaker 1: brace for all of the questions about that thing that
[43:17] Speaker 1: are likely to happen. Yeah. So yeah, I mean we
[43:22] Speaker 1: take it on a case by case basis, and there
[43:24] Speaker 1: are times where we'll check in with each other and go,
[43:27] Speaker 1: this is going to get into recent stuff. Do you
[43:28] Speaker 1: think that's okay, just as like a gut check. Right.
[43:32] Speaker 1: I have also heard I feel like I had a
[43:35] Speaker 1: professor in college who said that their rule of thumb
[43:38] Speaker 1: is its history. If it's the previous generations thing, like
[43:42] Speaker 1: you may have lived through part of it, but like
[43:44] Speaker 1: if it was really a thing that impacted your parents,
[43:48] Speaker 1: it's you could consider that history. And that's the thing.
[43:52] Speaker 1: There's no rule, not just for us, but I don't
[43:54] Speaker 1: think anywhere you can't you can make guidelines. Right. We
[43:58] Speaker 1: talked about it a little bit in the when we
[44:01] Speaker 1: did the episodes about the Vietnam draft board raids. When
[44:05] Speaker 1: we started working on this episode, I are not this
[44:10] Speaker 1: episode this podcast. When we joined as hosts, the Vietnam
[44:16] Speaker 1: War felt too recent to me, But that was now
[44:21] Speaker 1: more than ten years ago, and we are farther from
[44:24] Speaker 1: that now, so that felt less less too recent for me.
[44:31] Speaker 1: I have other reasons. Yeah, we're getting close to fifteen
[44:34] Speaker 1: years ago. Yeah, that's true a long time. I think
[44:39] Speaker 1: we're at thirteen right now, at least from when I
[44:42] Speaker 1: when I came on. Oh yeah, he came on a
[44:44] Speaker 1: little earlier than me, so yeah. Yeah. The other thing
[44:51] Speaker 1: that you asked about in your email about like do
[44:55] Speaker 1: we get more clarity or less the farther things go back.
[45:00] Speaker 1: This is something that like the show I used to
[45:03] Speaker 1: work on, Criminalia, was kind of entirely based on this,
[45:06] Speaker 1: Like if we look at crimes, historical true crime from
[45:10] Speaker 1: the past through a modern lens with more research, like,
[45:14] Speaker 1: are any of these criminals and villains actually kind of misunderstood?
[45:18] Speaker 1: Which is often the case, right, A lot of women
[45:21] Speaker 1: that were vilified throughout history. It's like, no, that's not
[45:25] Speaker 1: what's going on here. I mean, we had cases on
[45:28] Speaker 1: that show of women who were considered witches and it
[45:30] Speaker 1: turned out really they were dealing with, you know, some
[45:34] Speaker 1: kind of mental illness or even a physical infirmity that
[45:39] Speaker 1: made them other that they got you know, ostracized, or
[45:42] Speaker 1: like there were people that when you look at the
[45:44] Speaker 1: bigger picture, you understand, oh, they've kind of been the
[45:48] Speaker 1: victim of bad press throughout history because one person told
[45:51] Speaker 1: their story and that's what got repeated. We see that
[45:54] Speaker 1: all the time on this show as well. And so
[45:58] Speaker 1: that is another thing that's case by case. Right, Sometimes
[46:00] Speaker 1: you have better perspective from a distance, but you also
[46:05] Speaker 1: lose clarity in terms of like being able to say
[46:09] Speaker 1: with certainty what certain details were. This came up on
[46:13] Speaker 1: your Elizabeth Blackwell something so that you researched where it's
[46:17] Speaker 1: like people thought she was born at one point and
[46:19] Speaker 1: she was this Elizabeth, but really she's actually a different
[46:22] Speaker 1: Elizabeth than We only recently figured that out, yep. And
[46:26] Speaker 1: I say we meaning historians, Tracy and I did not
[46:28] Speaker 1: figure that out. She referenced the history who we cited
[46:32] Speaker 1: in the episode. But so that too is a little
[46:35] Speaker 1: bit case by case. I think there are sometimes where
[46:37] Speaker 1: you get a treasure trove of information kind of dropped
[46:41] Speaker 1: that nobody knew throughout history and only came to light
[46:44] Speaker 1: because modern you know, living technology, records access enabled somebody
[46:51] Speaker 1: to find it. And other times it gets farther, it
[46:54] Speaker 1: gets more and more lost, right, I mean. Thomas Harriet's
[46:58] Speaker 1: another one. We didn't know he was the first person
[47:01] Speaker 1: to look at the moon through a telescope because he
[47:03] Speaker 1: didn't publish about it. They found his notes in the
[47:05] Speaker 1: trash four hundred years later they get in a midden
[47:08] Speaker 1: heap on his family's property, so we don't know. Yeah,
[47:12] Speaker 1: we always love those surprises. That's why Onearthed is so popular.
[47:15] Speaker 1: I think it did shifts everybody's gears about what they think.
[47:18] Speaker 1: It's going to be. Time to work on that soon,
[47:20] Speaker 1: I know. Anyway, that's the long answer to you, and
[47:27] Speaker 1: I hope it was illuminating and not overwhelming. If you
[47:30] Speaker 1: would like to write to us and ask us a question,
[47:32] Speaker 1: or share pictures of art, animals, whatever, also thank you
[47:36] Speaker 1: for the art. We always love it. Listen, we love
[47:39] Speaker 1: a little felted activity that's made of cat for You
[47:42] Speaker 1: can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
[47:46] Speaker 1: If you want to see the show notes and the
[47:49] Speaker 1: resources that we used to put together an episode. You
[47:51] Speaker 1: can do that at mistinhistory dot com. If you would
[47:55] Speaker 1: like to subscribe to the show and you haven't gotten
[47:56] Speaker 1: to that yet, easypsy race and Cheesy, you could do
[47:59] Speaker 1: it on the eye Heart Radio app, or anywhere you
[48:01] Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History
[48:09] Speaker 1: Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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[48:18] Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.

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