Customer Reviews

The Goodyear Story: An Inventor's Obession and the Struggle for a Rubber Monopoly

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The Goodyear Story: An Inventor's Obsession And The Struggle For A Rubber Monopoly by Richard Korman (Senior Editor, Engineering News-Record, McGraw-Hill) is the amazing and informative biography of Charles Goodyear, the man who in the 1830's began his efforts to create rubber -- a material, in his belief, which would forever alter the world and the course of human civilization. His dream cost so much that his family lived in poverty and he suffered in debtor's prison. Yet his dream was not only to make rubber, but also to reap the wealth of controlling its creation and distribution; when others tried to lay claim to the manufacture of his miracle, only a lawsuit as argued by the famous Daniel Webster could settle the dispute once and for all. The Goodyear Story is a fascinating, true-life tale of science, business, and the striving of human nature against great odds and adverse circumstances.

Korman hits a home run with his portrait of the inventor Charles Goodyear and his self-destructive mania surrounding finding a way to make rubber a useful industrial product. The craziness continues when Goodyear claims the credit for the invention (and the royalties) as his own.

The book is a time-traveling glimpse into industrial revolutionary America and England and the swirling energy surrounding the changes happening at the time.

A must for ambitious business people and basement tinkerers!