Stretching The Truth
BEHIND EVERY GREAT INVENTION LIES a great crime. Or so it can appear from reading today’s technological historians, who sometimes make it seem that no important idea has ever enriched its actual originator. Morse, Bell, and Edison are just a few of the famous inventors who have been accused of stealing or duplicating others’ work or trampling on the rights of earlier discoverers. The pattern continues in this century with disputes over the invention of television, computers, and the laser. In keeping with this tradition, a pair of historians have recently re-evaluated the case of Charles Goodyear, who in 1844 patented his revolutionary process for vulcanizing rubber. Their books are the first full-length biographies of Goodyear in more than 60 years, and after going over much of the same ground, they arrive at very different conclusions.
The basics of Goodyear’s story are familiar: The penniless inventor spends years experimenting haphazardly and living hand to mouth with his faithful and long-suffering wife and children. One day in 1839 he accidentally heats a mixture of rubber, sulfur, and white lead on a stove and is amazed when it hardens but does not melt. After several more years of painstaking work to perfect the process, he takes out a patent and at last is rewarded for his dogged faith and determination.
In Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century (Hyperion, 288 pages, $24.95), Charles Slack stays close to this traditional story. In Slack’s view, the villains of the drama are Hancock, an English industrialist who pirated the vulcanization process (legally, for Goodyear had been too poor to patent it in Britain), and Horace Day, an American businessman who spent nearly two decades in repeated and unsuccessful attempts to cheat Goodyear of his patent rights. Without overlooking Goodyear’s flaws, Slack portrays him as a patient, innovative genius who was deprived of the full financial rewards he deserved by parasitic infringers.
A less admiring account can be found in The Goodyear Story: An Inventor’s Obsession and the Struggle for a Rubber Monopoly , by Richard Korman (Encounter Books, 230 pages, $25.95). In Korman’s view, Goodyear was a feckless charlatan who stole other people’s work and tried to crush legitimate competitors. Moreover, he never should have been granted his patent in the first place, because vulcanization was actually discovered by William Ely, one of many victims that Goodyear fleeced for cash and then abandoned.
Korman has uncovered more detail on the Goodyear-Ely relationship than any previous biographer. Yet by trying too hard to knock a revered figure off his pedestal, Korman ends up sounding like a prosecuting attorney, to the point where Day’s blatantly illegal industrial espionage, with the admitted purpose of infringing one of Goodyear’s patents, is described as an altruistic attempt “to re-balance the scales of injustice” on behalf of a disgruntled former Goodyear employee.
The author’s most important assertion, that Ely and not Goodyear discovered vulcanization, is casually presented as a fact with no hint that it might be open to question. The source? A deposition submitted by Day in 1858 to challenge the extension of Goodyear’s patent. And the deponent? Not Ely himself, who was dead by then. Instead it was one of Day’s business partners, who purported to recall witnessing the event two decades earlier.
Like most old-fashioned biographers and too many modern ones, Korman makes no distinction between verifiable events and scenes that he has invented and dramatized on his own. Sometimes the effect is merely silly, as when he somehow divines across a century and a half that Goodyear’s wife, Clarissa, about whom almost no information survives, felt “selfconscious about her graying hair and thickening waist.” In other places, though, this practice undermines the author’s argument. Korman describes an angry Ely threatening to “break down Goodyear’s claim to patent” by revealing “who was the true inventor of heated India rubber.” Did this actually happen, or is it just his imagination? The author gives no source.
Goodyear had his flaws, to be sure. And anybody, inventors included, can be made to look like a saint by accentuating the positive or like a devil by emphasizing the negative. Yet no one can deny the ceaseless toil that Goodyear put into making rubber work, especially the grueling years he spent converting vulcanization from a chance discovery to a consistent, reproducible industrial process. Others made their contributions, financial and inventive, but Goodyear’s persistence and indefatigability have justly earned him the title of Father of the Rubber Industry.
