Part IThe Story
A Scrap on the Stove
Sometime in the winter of 1839, in the small Massachusetts town of Woburn, a thin, sickly, deeply indebted man let a piece of rubber mixed with sulfur touch a hot stove. Every piece of rubber he had ever heated had melted into a stinking glue. This one charred at the edges, the way leather does, and around the char was a dry, springy rim that was still elastic. He nailed the scrap outside in the freezing air overnight. In the morning it was still flexible.
Charles Goodyear had been trying to make rubber usable for nearly five years by then, and he had already announced several false breakthroughs. His creditors, his relatives and most of the rubber trade regarded him as a crank. It would take him five more years to turn the scrap on the stove into a reliable manufacturing process, and he would patent it in 1844. The process, later called vulcanization, made rubber stable in heat and cold. It opened the way to waterproof clothing and footwear, industrial belts and hoses, insulation, medical goods and, decades after his death, the pneumatic tire.
Goodyear never profited in proportion to what he had made possible. He had been jailed for debt before the discovery and was jailed again after it, in Boston, in England and in Paris. He brought more than two hundred lawsuits against infringers and won the most famous of them, but spent much of what he earned on litigation, exhibitions and further experiments. When he died in 1860 he owed about $200,000. The largest rubber company in the world bears his name, but it was founded nearly four decades after his death by people who had no connection to him.
His story is often told as a parable of persistence rewarded by luck. It is better read as a study in two different skills: the patient, ingenious work of discovering something valuable, and the separate, unglamorous work of capturing the value. Goodyear mastered the first and never learned the second.
By the Numbers
The Goodyear Record
10 yearsFrom Goodyear's first rubber experiments in 1834 to his vulcanization patent in 1844
$3,000Price Goodyear agreed to pay Nathaniel Hayward in 1838 for the rights to his sulfur patent
200+Infringement suits Goodyear brought in the late 1840s and early 1850s
$15,000Fee Goodyear is reported to have paid Daniel Webster in the Great India-Rubber Case of 1852
$163,000Approximate earnings from his patent by 1858, far less than he owed
$200,000Approximate debts at his death in 1860
A Hardware Merchant from New Haven
Charles Goodyear was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 29, 1800, the eldest of six children of Amasa Goodyear and Cynthia Bateman Goodyear. The family traced its roots to Stephen Goodyear, one of the London merchants who founded the New Haven colony in 1638. Amasa was a hardware merchant and a minor inventor whose products included a steel hay fork, a lighter and stronger alternative to the cast-iron forks then common. In 1807 he moved the family to a farm near Naugatuck, Connecticut, where he had bought a water-powered factory that made buttons and farm tools.
Charles was a serious, religious boy who considered becoming a minister. At about seventeen he went instead to Philadelphia to learn the hardware trade. He later returned to Connecticut to work with his father. In August 1824 he married Clarissa Beecher, and two years later the young couple moved to Philadelphia, where Charles opened a hardware store selling the farm implements the family made. At a time when most such tools were imported from Britain, the store specialized in American-made goods, and for a while it did well.
The business did not last. Goodyear sold heavily on credit, fell seriously ill with dyspepsia around 1829, and saw the firm fail under the weight of its debts. Rather than take the relief of bankruptcy, he tried to repay his creditors over time. They lost patience, and in 1830 he was jailed for debt in Philadelphia. Over the following decade he would be imprisoned for debt repeatedly. He was thirty, with a growing family, a record of business failure and no obvious path forward.
Rubber Fever
In the early 1830s Americans had fallen briefly in love with rubber. The gum of South American trees was waterproof and elastic, and manufacturers began making it into coats, boots and life preservers. The Roxbury India Rubber Company of Massachusetts, generally described as the first American rubber manufacturer, led the way, and others quickly followed. The trouble was that raw rubber turned hard and brittle in cold weather and soft, sticky and foul-smelling in heat. Goods that looked fine when sold in winter came back as glue in summer.
In the summer of 1834 Goodyear, visiting New York, walked into the Roxbury company's retail store. According to the company's later account of the episode, he had noticed that the valve on its rubber life preservers was poorly made, designed a better one, and came back hoping to sell it. The manager told him that the company was in no position to buy anything. Its customers were returning melted goods by the thousand, and the directors, according to the same account, had quietly buried about $20,000 worth of rejects. The rubber boom was ending as quickly as it had started, and none of the early companies would last five years.
Goodyear left with the valve still in his pocket and an idea that would occupy the rest of his life. If someone could make rubber stable across the seasons, the market that had just collapsed would return, far larger than before. He had no training in chemistry and no money, but he had an unusual capacity for single-minded work, and rubber was cheap.
Experiments in Jail and Kitchen
When Goodyear returned to Philadelphia, a creditor had him jailed again. He began experimenting in his cell, working raw rubber by hand. His first idea was simple: if rubber was sticky, perhaps a dry powder could absorb the stickiness. He tried magnesia, a powder sold by druggists, and the results looked promising. Out of jail, he and his family made several hundred pairs of rubber overshoes in their kitchen, with magnesia worked into the gum. Before he could sell them, summer arrived and the shoes sagged into paste.
He moved to New York, where he worked in a borrowed attic room and walked to a mill in Greenwich Village to use its equipment. He tried boiling rubber with magnesia and quicklime, which produced a smoother, less sticky material. In 1835 he showed goods made this way at fairs held by New York's American Institute and Mechanics' Institute and won medals. Then he found that even a drop of weak acid destroyed the treatment. The "tanned" rubber, as he called it, was another dead end.
His next discovery came from an accident he almost missed. He liked to decorate his samples, and one day he used nitric acid to strip bronze paint from an old piece. The rubber turned black, and he threw it away. Days later, remembering that it had felt different, he retrieved it and found that the acid had given the surface a smooth, dry finish. He patented this "acid-gas" process on June 17, 1837, and even received a letter of commendation for his goods from President Andrew Jackson. The work was dangerous. Goodyear nearly suffocated from gas generated in his workroom and afterwards suffered a fever that almost killed him.
A New York businessman advanced several thousand dollars to begin production, and Goodyear set up a factory on Staten Island. Then the Panic of 1837 ruined his backer. The Goodyears, penniless again, camped in the abandoned factory, where, by the company's account, they lived for a time on fish he caught in the harbor.
Woburn and the Mailbags
Goodyear next found support in Boston from John Haskins, a former owner of the Roxbury company, and moved his family to Woburn, north of the city. He began making thin rubber goods such as tablecloths and piano covers. In Woburn he also met Nathaniel Hayward, the former foreman of the defunct Eagle India Rubber Company, who had been experimenting on his own. Hayward had found that rubber treated with sulfur and dried in the sun, a method he called "solarization," was much less sticky.
Goodyear recognized that Hayward was onto something. In 1838 he agreed to buy the rights to Hayward's process for $3,000, paid through a complicated mix of cash, a promissory note and a license, and hired Hayward as an employee. Hayward's patent, No. 1,090, was issued on February 24, 1839, with Goodyear named as assignee. It was a shrewd acquisition by a man who had almost nothing: he could not pay for it in cash, but he secured the most promising line of research in the field.
Hayward's role later became the subject of a local legend that he, not Goodyear, had discovered vulcanization. The record does not support it. Hayward's own patent describes mixing sulfur into rubber with solvents or by rolling, without the prolonged high heat that defines vulcanization. In a later affidavit, preserved in the Patent Office records of the 1850s, Hayward argued that his sulfur treatment was valuable on its own, since many goods could be made from it without being vulcanized, a claim that implicitly conceded the heat process was Goodyear's. The two men's contributions were different in kind. Hayward found an ingredient that improved rubber a little. Goodyear found the conditions under which that ingredient changed rubber completely.
Before the value of sulfur became clear, however, Goodyear suffered his most public failure. His partners won a federal government contract to make 150 rubber mailbags. Goodyear was confident enough in his goods that, according to one widely told account, he stored the finished bags in a warm room and left town. When he returned, the bags had melted. Sources differ on whether they were made with his nitric-acid process or with Hayward's sulfur treatment, but the effect was the same. His credit collapsed, his backers withdrew and his reputation as a man who could not deliver hardened. By the winter of 1838 to 1839 local farmers were letting his children dig half-grown potatoes from their fields.
The Prepared Mind
The discovery at the stove came in the middle of this collapse. The most common version, repeated by the Goodyear company in its own history, has him in a Woburn store in February 1839, waving a lump of his rubber-and-sulfur compound while arguing with skeptical townspeople, and accidentally flinging it onto a hot potbellied stove. Other versions place the event in his kitchen. Goodyear himself left the details vague.
He was firm, though, about what the moment meant. In his later book, he rejected the idea that he had simply been lucky. He compared the hot stove to Newton's falling apple: an event that carried meaning only for the person whose mind was prepared to draw the inference, the one who had applied himself most persistently to the subject. By 1839 he had spent five years mixing rubber with nearly every substance he could find. When the charred scrap stayed flexible, he was probably the only person in America who would have understood what he was looking at.
Understanding it was only the start. He now knew that heat and sulfur together transformed rubber, but not how much heat, for how long, or in what proportions. The next winter was, by his family's accounts, the worst of his life. Suffering from gout and dyspepsia, he moved about on crutches. He roasted rubber in hot sand, steamed it over a kettle, pressed it between hot irons and pushed samples into his wife's bread oven. He pawned his watch and the furniture. On a trip to Boston to look for backers he was jailed for an unpaid hotel bill of about five dollars, and he returned home to find that his infant son had died. Six of the Goodyears' twelve children died in infancy or early childhood.
Eventually he found that heating the compound with steam under pressure for several hours at around 270 degrees Fahrenheit gave the most consistent results. He had a process.
Shirred Goods and the Patent
What finally made the process commercial was a fashion. Goodyear wrote to his brother-in-law William De Forest, a New York woolen manufacturer who had once lectured him about neglecting his children, and explained that threads of cured rubber woven into cloth could produce the puckered, "shirred" effect then fashionable in shirts. De Forest was interested, and over the years his investment in Goodyear's work grew to nearly $50,000. Goodyear began making sheet goods in 1841, moved his main operations to a small factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, run largely by his brothers, and on March 9, 1844, patented a machine for making shirred rubber fabrics.
On June 15, 1844, he received U.S. Patent No. 3,633 for an "Improvement in India-Rubber Fabrics," the patent that covered vulcanization. That year the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company was established in Connecticut, the start of a rubber industry in the Naugatuck Valley that would last for more than a century. His brother Henry introduced mechanical mixing in place of solvents, and another brother, Nelson, later patented hard rubber for uses such as dentures.
Having finally reached the point where he could build a business, Goodyear largely chose not to. He disposed of his manufacturing interests and licensed his patents to other makers, product by product, then went back to inventing. He wanted to make everything from rubber: banknotes, musical instruments, ship sails, jewelry, even ships. He had his portrait painted on rubber and wore rubber hats and ties. Many of his ideas were decades ahead of their time. His licensing terms were far behind. According to the Goodyear company's history, the rights to shirred goods went for a royalty of three cents a yard on cloth that licensees sold for three dollars a yard.
Losing Britain
Goodyear had been slow to seek patents abroad, but he had not been slow to show off. In the early 1840s samples of his cured rubber, sent to potential British partners without an explanation of how they were made, reached England. One reached Thomas Hancock, a leading British rubber manufacturer and partner in Charles Macintosh and Company, who had been trying for years to solve the same problem. Hancock later said a friend, William Brockedon, had shown him American samples treated with sulfur in 1842. Whether or not he analyzed them, as critics later claimed, he worked out a vulcanization method of his own, involving immersion in molten sulfur, and filed a provisional British patent on November 21, 1843. Goodyear had not applied for one. It was Brockedon, by Hancock's account, who suggested the name "vulcanization," after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.
When Goodyear finally sought British protection, he found Hancock already in place. According to the Goodyear company, Hancock offered him a half-share in the British patent if he would drop his challenge, and Goodyear refused. In 1855 Hancock's patent was contested in court by another British maker, Stephen Moulton, with the argument that Hancock had copied Goodyear. Goodyear attended the trial, hoping that if Hancock lost, his own British application would succeed. Several chemists testified that no one could have deduced the process from examining the samples. Hancock won, and Britain, then the world's largest manufacturing economy, was lost to Goodyear.
The Great India-Rubber Case
At home Goodyear fought infringers relentlessly. As soon as the 1844 patent was issued, rival manufacturers challenged it and others used the process without paying. Goodyear granted licenses to particular firms for particular products, secured a reissue of his patent that broadened its scope, and sued both unlicensed makers and licensees he believed were cheating him. A Yale Law Journal study of nineteenth-century patent litigation counts more than two hundred suits brought by Goodyear in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
The largest was against Horace H. Day, a New Jersey rubber manufacturer who had been one of Goodyear's most persistent adversaries. The case was argued in March 1852 before the federal circuit court at Trenton, New Jersey, with Justice Robert Grier of the Supreme Court and Judge Philemon Dickerson on the bench. The written proofs and exhibits ran to about 4,000 printed pages. Goodyear hired Daniel Webster, then secretary of state and the most celebrated advocate in the country, for a fee widely reported as $15,000, said to be the largest ever paid to an American lawyer at the time. Day was represented by Rufus Choate, one of Webster's few rivals at the bar. Webster, who died that October, spoke for two days.
On September 28, 1852, the court granted Goodyear a perpetual injunction against Day. The case became known as the Great India-Rubber Case, and legal historians regard Grier's decision as an important step toward deciding patent disputes in equity, before judges, without a jury. It made headlines and confirmed Goodyear's claim to be the inventor of vulcanization. It did not end infringement.
Palaces of Rubber
Goodyear's approach to publicity matched his approach to invention: total commitment regardless of cost. At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, he built a Vulcanite Court, a suite of three rooms whose walls, roof, furniture, carpets and fittings were made of rubber, larger than the entire American section. It displayed combs, musical instruments, gloves, rafts and balloons, all of rubber. He borrowed heavily to pay for it.
In 1852 he went to Europe himself, in part to pursue his patent claims. His wife Clarissa, worn out by decades of hardship, died in England in 1853. That year he published Gum-Elastic and Its Varieties, a two-volume account of rubber, its uses and his own discovery, written in the third person. According to the Goodyear company, some copies were printed on and bound in rubber.
For the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris he built another elaborate rubber pavilion, again largely on credit. Then his French patent was canceled on a technicality, his French royalties stopped, and his creditors had him arrested. He spent sixteen days in the Clichy debtors' prison in Paris. While he was there, Emperor Napoleon III made him a knight of the Legion of Honour. By most accounts his son brought the medal to his cell. That same year he was also briefly jailed for debt in England.
— Charles Goodyear, Gum-Elastic and Its Varieties, 1853In reflecting upon the past, as relates to these branches of industry, the writer is not disposed to repine, and say that he has planted, and others have gathered the fruits. The advantages of a career in life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents, as is too often done. Man has just cause for regret when he sows and no one reaps.
The Extension and the End
Goodyear returned to the United States and, in 1858, applied for a seven-year extension of his vulcanization patent, which was due to expire after its original fourteen-year term. Extensions were granted when an inventor had not been reasonably paid for his work through no fault of his own. Goodyear showed that he had earned about $163,000 from the patent, a considerable sum, but that he owed far more to the creditors who had kept him alive while he developed it. Commissioner of Patents Joseph Holt granted the extension in June 1858 in a decision that read in places like a defense brief for the inventor.
— Joseph Holt, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, Goodyear extension decision, 1858No inventor probably has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the parlance of the world, with no exaggeration of phrase, as 'pirates.'
The decision drew criticism as well as praise. Opponents of long patent monopolies campaigned against extensions for Goodyear and other inventors, and in 1861, a year after his death, Congress abolished the Patent Office's power to grant them. His heirs' later requests for renewal were refused.
By then Goodyear was an old man in his late fifties. For his last six years, gout and neuralgia had forced him to walk on crutches. He kept devising new uses for rubber. In the summer of 1860 he set out to visit a dying daughter in New Haven. When he reached New York he learned that she had already died. He collapsed and was taken to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where he died on July 1, 1860, aged fifty-nine. He had never kept a proper accounting of his debts. His son Charles Goodyear Jr. untangled the books, paid off the creditors and secured a modest income for the family from the remaining royalties. The son had inherited his father's inventiveness and a better head for business: he developed shoemaking machinery, and the Goodyear welt, a method of attaching soles to shoes, is named after him.
An Industry Without Its Founder
By the year of Goodyear's death, the industry built on vulcanized rubber employed an estimated 60,000 people and produced goods worth more than $8 million a year. Rubber went on to become one of the essential materials of industrial society, in belting, hoses and seals, electrical insulation, medical products and, above all, tires. In 1898 Frank Seiberling founded a tire company in Akron, Ohio, and named it after the inventor. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company grew into the largest rubber business in the world. Neither Goodyear nor his family ever had any connection with it. In 1976 Goodyear was among the inventors inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later inventors such as Thomas Edison learned to build organizations around their discoveries, with laboratories, financiers, manufacturing affiliates and lawyers working together. Goodyear worked almost alone. He solved a problem that had defeated the best-capitalized rubber firms of his day, through a combination of stubbornness, ingenuity and a willingness to endure poverty that his family paid for as much as he did. But he treated the business side of invention, including patents abroad, licensing terms, costs and accounts, as a distraction from the real work. The industry he created thrived, and it thrived without him.
Part IIThe Playbook
Goodyear's life divides neatly into two lessons. The first half of his playbook comes from what he did brilliantly: finding a problem worth solving and grinding through failure until he solved it. The second half comes from what he did badly: protecting, pricing and paying for the thing he had found. Anyone who invents something valuable needs both.
The principles
- 1.Start where the customers are sending goods back.
- 2.Experiment with whatever is within reach.
- 3.Test in the conditions that destroy the product.
- 4.Pick the anomaly out of the trash.
- 5.Buy the adjacent idea.
- 6.Turn a discovery into a process before you celebrate.
- 7.Protect the idea everywhere before you show it anywhere.
- 8.Price licenses against the licensee's margin.
- 9.Win the decisive case, not every case.
- 10.Budget the showroom like any other investment.
- 11.Keep an honest ledger.
Principle 1
Start where the customers are sending goods back.
Goodyear's life's work began in a store full of returned merchandise. The Roxbury manager showed him racks of melted goods and told him customers were sending them back by the thousand. That was the clearest possible market signal: people wanted rubber products badly enough to buy them, and the products failed them. Solving that failure would unlock demand that already existed.
Returns, complaints and abandoned products are often better guides to opportunity than surveys. They show what people tried to buy and why it let them down.
Tactic: Find the categories in your industry with the highest return, cancellation or complaint rates. Pick the single most common failure and ask whether a fix would bring back customers who have given up.
Principle 2
Experiment with whatever is within reach.
Goodyear ran his first rubber experiments in a debtor's cell, using materials his wife brought him. He continued in kitchens, attics and borrowed mills, using drugstore powders, household tools and his wife's oven. He never waited for a proper laboratory or adequate capital, because he knew he might never have either.
Cheap, fast experiments with available materials have a real advantage: they let you test many more ideas before money runs out. The discipline Goodyear showed here is closely related to the experimental mindset that later inventors turned into a system.
Tactic: Before asking for funding or equipment, list the cheapest ways to test your core idea using materials and tools you already have. Run at least a handful of those tests and let their results decide what you need to buy.
Principle 3
Test in the conditions that destroy the product.
Goodyear's early failures had a common pattern. His magnesia overshoes looked fine until summer. His acid-cured goods looked fine until they met a drop of weak acid. The mailbags looked fine until they sat in a warm room. Each time, he tested the product in the conditions where it was likely to succeed and was then humiliated by the conditions where it failed.
After 1839 he changed his approach. He left his cured scrap out in the freezing air, then heated it every way he could think of, deliberately seeking the conditions that had ruined rubber before.
Tactic: For each product you plan to ship, write down the three conditions most likely to make it fail, whether heat, load, misuse or scale. Test it under those conditions before any customer sees it, and do not ship until it survives them.
Principle 4
Pick the anomaly out of the trash.
Two of Goodyear's key discoveries came from things he nearly discarded. He threw away the piece of rubber blackened by nitric acid, then retrieved it days later because it had felt different. When his sulfur compound hit the stove, he looked closely at the result instead of scraping it off as another mess. His own view was that such accidents only matter to someone prepared to notice them.
Anomalies are among the most valuable data an experimenter gets, and among the easiest to ignore, because they do not fit the plan. Expanding what some call your luck surface area depends as much on noticing surprises as on creating opportunities for them.
Tactic: Keep a running list of results that surprised you, including failures that failed in an unexpected way. Review it weekly and pick one surprise to investigate deliberately.
Principle 5
Buy the adjacent idea.
Goodyear did not discover the value of sulfur on his own. Nathaniel Hayward had found that sulfur reduced rubber's stickiness, and Goodyear, with almost no money, bought the rights to Hayward's patent and hired him. That acquisition gave him the ingredient that, combined with heat, produced vulcanization.
Inventors often resist building on others' work, from pride or a wish to own the whole discovery. Goodyear's willingness to buy a promising partial solution, and to structure a deal he could afford, was one of his best business decisions.
Tactic: Identify people working on problems adjacent to yours who have found a partial solution. Approach them with a deal structure you can afford, such as a license, a share of future revenue or a job, rather than trying to rediscover what they already know.
Principle 6
Turn a discovery into a process before you celebrate.
The stove incident showed that heat and sulfur could transform rubber. It did not show how to do it reliably. Goodyear spent years working out the temperature, duration and method, finally settling on pressurized steam for several hours. Only then did he have something he could patent and license.
Many breakthroughs stall between the first demonstration and a repeatable process. Goodyear's earlier false starts, announced too soon, had cost him his credibility. This time he did not seek a patent until the process was reliable.
Tactic: When an experiment succeeds, try to reproduce it at least several times under varied conditions before announcing it. Write down the exact parameters needed and hand them to someone else to see whether they can get the same result.
Principle 7
Protect the idea everywhere before you show it anywhere.
Goodyear sent samples of his cured rubber to Britain before he had filed for a British patent. Thomas Hancock examined American samples, developed his own process and filed first. Whatever the truth about how much Hancock learned from the samples, the sequence cost Goodyear the world's largest manufacturing market.
Intellectual property is territorial and time-sensitive. Showing an invention to potential partners before securing protection in their markets invites exactly the outcome Goodyear suffered.
Tactic: Before sending samples or demonstrations to any foreign partner, confirm that protection is filed or pending in that country. If you cannot afford to file everywhere, decide which markets matter most and do not disclose the invention in the others until you are covered.
Principle 8
Price licenses against the licensee's margin.
Goodyear licensed his shirred-goods rights for a royalty of about three cents a yard on cloth that sold for about three dollars a yard. His licensees kept almost all the value his invention created. Across many such deals, he gave away what could have been a fortune.
A license price should reflect the value the invention adds to the licensee's product, not what seems a fair reward for the inventor's effort or what the inventor needs to pay next month's bills. Goodyear's constant need for cash weakened his bargaining position.
Tactic: Before setting a royalty, estimate the licensee's gross margin on the product and how much of it your invention makes possible. Set your price as a share of that value, and avoid negotiating when you urgently need the money.
Principle 9
Win the decisive case, not every case.
Goodyear's victory in the Great India-Rubber Case confirmed his patent and produced a perpetual injunction against his most determined rival. Hiring Webster for that case was money well spent. But alongside it he pursued more than two hundred other suits, and the combined cost consumed much of what the patent earned.
Litigation can protect valuable rights, but its costs grow with every case. The most effective enforcers choose a small number of cases that set a precedent and deter others, rather than fighting every infringement.
Tactic: Rank potential enforcement actions by how much they would deter others if won. Concentrate resources on the top few, use their outcomes to negotiate settlements with the rest, and set a total litigation budget in advance.
Principle 10
Budget the showroom like any other investment.
Goodyear's exhibitions in London and Paris were spectacular and won him international recognition, including the Legion of Honour. They were also financed with borrowed money and helped send him to debtors' prison twice in 1855. The publicity did not produce enough revenue to cover the cost.
Marketing can be essential for a new technology, but it has to be judged by what it returns. Goodyear treated display as proof of his vision, not as an expense that needed to pay for itself.
Tactic: Before committing to a major marketing or exhibition expense, estimate the revenue it must generate to pay for itself and how you will measure that revenue. If you cannot fund it without borrowing against uncertain returns, scale it down.
Principle 11
Keep an honest ledger.
Goodyear never made a proper accounting of his debts. After his death his son had to untangle the books before creditors could be paid and the family provided for. For most of his life Goodyear did not know precisely how much he owed, to whom, or how much his patents really earned.
A founder who does not know the numbers cannot make sound decisions about what to spend, what to charge or when to stop. Goodyear's grit carried him through extraordinary hardship, but grit without accounts also carried his family through hardship he could have prevented.
Tactic: Keep a simple, current record of every debt, obligation and source of revenue, and review it monthly. If you cannot do this yourself, make it the first job you delegate to someone you trust.
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Part IIIMaxims
- Collapse clears the field. The rubber bust of the 1830s drove away every competitor with capital, leaving room for a penniless outsider who refused to quit.
- Credibility is spent by early announcements. Each premature claim of success made the next backer harder to find.
- The family funds the obsession. Goodyear's wife and children paid for his persistence in hunger, illness and lost children.
- Fame and solvency are separate accounts. He received a knighthood in a debtors' prison.
- A patent is only as good as its borders. Britain was lost not in a laboratory but in the mail.
- Recognition often arrives through the courts. Newspaper coverage of his lawsuits did more for his reputation as the inventor than his discovery did.
- The next generation can fix the books. His son settled the debts and built a business of his own on sounder terms.
- A name outlives a fortune. The world's largest rubber company borrowed his name without owing him anything.
- Some rewards are measured in reach. Goodyear judged his life by whether others could harvest what he had sown, and by that measure he succeeded.
In Their Own Words
I was encouraged in my efforts by the reflection that what is hidden and unknown, and cannot be discovered by scientific research, will most likely be discovered by accident, if at all, by the man who applies himself most perseveringly to the subject.— Charles Goodyear
The inventor of this process has not merely discovered something, but he has discovered how to make discoveries. He has not merely added to the stock of human knowledge, but he has added to the power of human acquisition.— Daniel Webster
The writer is not disposed to repine, and say that he has planted and others have gathered the fruits. The advantages of a career in life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents, as is too often done. Man has just cause for regret when he sows and no one reaps.— Charles Goodyear
Life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents. I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps.— Charles Goodyear
The discovery of this process has been attended with much labor, anxiety, and expense, as well as ridicule and reproach. The writer does not wish to occupy the time of the reader with a detail of his embarrassments, but he would say that he has found the business of introducing a new manufacture, with insufficient means, to be like sailing against wind and tide.— Charles Goodyear
There is probably no other inert substance which so excites the mind, and offers such great advantages to the human family, as caoutchouc, when its properties are properly developed.— Charles Goodyear
The writer has found the business of introducing a new manufacture, with insufficient means, to be like sailing against wind and tide.— Charles Goodyear
In prosecuting his experiments, he has uniformly found that the results of his labors have exceeded his most sanguine expectations. In every instance where he has had occasion to prepare fabrics for a specific purpose, they have proved better adapted to that purpose than he had dared to hope.— Charles Goodyear
The properties of gum-elastic are not fully understood. Like the metals, it is capable of being vulcanized or sulfurized to different degrees, for different purposes, and the degree of vulcanization may be varied to suit the purpose for which it is intended.— Charles Goodyear
The writer would remark that, although he has spoken of this discovery as an accident, it is not to be supposed that it was the result of what is commonly termed chance; it was the direct result of the application of heat to a compound of gum-elastic, sulfur, and white lead.— Charles Goodyear
I am disposed to apply the same rule to the judgment of experiments with gum-elastic as others do to the judgment of the fine arts, and say that the excellence of the work, and not the time it takes to perform it, should be the standard by which it should be judged.— Charles Goodyear
The writer believes that he has opened a new field for enterprise and given employment to thousands of persons, and that the results of his labors will be beneficial to mankind for ages to come.— Charles Goodyear
It may be that I am not to enjoy, in my lifetime, the fruits of my labor, but I am cheered by the reflection that, should my efforts prove successful, the benefits will not be limited to myself or my family, but will be shared by the whole human race.— Charles Goodyear
A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps.— Charles Goodyear
