🛞 1839
Improvement in India-Rubber Fabrics
U.S. Patent 3,633 · 1844
From the abstract
What I claim as my invention, and desire to secure by Letters Patent, is the within-described improvement in the manufacture of India-rubber, by combining sulphur and white lead with the gum, and submitting the same to the action of artificial heat, substantially as set forth.
Note
Goodyear had been bankrupt and in debtors' prison repeatedly while pursuing a way to make natural rubber stable across temperatures — raw rubber turned brittle in cold and gummy in heat, ruining every product made from it. The actual discovery, in 1839, was an accident: he dropped a sulfur-rubber mixture onto a hot stove. He patented it in 1844 and was promptly out-litigated and out-licensed; he died in 1860 owing $200,000. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (1898) was named for him but had no family connection.