Charles Goodyear was born in New Haven, Connecticut on December 29, 1800 to Amasa and Cynthia Goodyear. Charles’s father was a hardware manufacture and a merchant. Amasa Goodyear built mainly farming tools like hayforks and scythes, which he invented. When Charles was a teenager he wanted to go into the ministry and become a pastor, but his father convinced him that he was a good business man and placed him in the hardware store of the …showed first 75 words of 984 total…

…showed last 75 words of 984 total…left his widow and six children with a debt of approximately two hundred thousand dollars! Without Goodyear’s discovery where would we be today? We would still have wood or stone tires. In the summer the soles of our shoes would stick to the pavement and we would never be able to erase on a paper when we made a mistake. It would be a lot more difficult without rubber and the process of vulcanization.