Charles Goodyear Essay -- essays research papers

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 Rogers brothers in Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. He worked there until he was twenty-one years old. At that time he returned to New Haven to join his father’s business, making farm tools. For five years he worked for his father, building up the family business. On August 24, 1824, while he was still working for his father he married Clarissa Beecher who also lived in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1826 Charles Goodyear decided to move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There he opened a hardware store where he sold the products that his f ather made. Four years after opening this store both Amasa and Charles Goodyear were bankrupt because they would extend credit to customers and the customers would never pay back the money that they owed. Charles’s health started to decline and both father and son owed tens of thousands of dollars. For the next thirty years Charles Goodyear was thrown in prison over ten times because he didn’t pay his debts. In 1834 when he was in New York, on a business trip, the Roxbury India Rubber Company caught his eye. ...