Charles Goodyear

Together with an old business partner he built up a factory and began to make clothing life preservers rubber shoes and a great variety of rubber goods. The manager was pleased with the ingenuity that Goodyear had shown in manufacturing the tubes. The Roxbury Rubber Company of Boston had been for some time experimenting with the gum and believed it had found means for manufacturing goods from it.

Goodyear discovered the vulcanization process accidentally after five years of searching for a more stable rubber.