Many invention and ideas that happened accidentally. Muller
(n.d) reported about 24 of such accidental
inventions at mentalfloss.com website. Some of the inventions include a
microwave oven, coal tar, and rubber. The one I will like to discuss the
accidental invention of rubber which I learned when I was as a child. I learned
from my primary school days that piece of a hardened rubber accidentally fell
in a fire and turned into industrial rubber. What a funny story It was by then.
The actual accidental invention of rubber is what I will discuss
here. According to a report, in 1939 a man named Charles Goodyear accidentally
dropped a rubber mixed with lean and sulfur onto a hot stove (Muller, n.d.).
The rubber mixture hardened and became very durable and resistance to heat and
could and became the industrial rubber use today.
Before Charles Goodyear invention, there was rubber, but the
rubber was not for industrial purposes. The substance which used for rubber
comes from rubber trees in the tropical forest. I have personally seen a rubber
tree and the rubber material called latex in Ghana. But the old rubber could
not be use for the industrial product as we have it today. The rubber in at
that time get hardened in the cold winter season and will melt in summer when
it is hot. The rubber industry was dying because of the characteristics of
rubber and people who sell and use rubber were becoming hopeless.
The rubber industry in the USA began the 1930s. Many people
wanted to use a waterproof gum from Brazil, but the people found out that it was
a mess (Goodyear
Corporate, n.d.). The rubber is frozen and become hardened in winter and will
melt and turned to look like glue in the summer which resulted in investors in
rubber industry lost millions of dollars and many closed down.
That is when a man from Philadelphia called Goodyear who was
a hardware store owner try to do something about rubber. Goodyear has been
experimenting with rubber and because he had no funding became so poor, and he
went to jail because of debt. Goodyear made his first rubber experiment in a
police cell. When he was out of jail, he continued to try again and again to make
his experiment reality. He mixed different substance such as magnesium powder, quicklime,
and nitric acid to the rubber but could not achieve the dire result. The rubber
still gets hardened in winter and melt in summer. The sad news was that Goodyear
became so obsessed with his experiment and became so poor that he could not
feed his family and was constantly in debt. For five futile years, Goodyear was near rock
bottom. People from Boston the place where he lived gave his children food, to
eat, and he lost children in the process.
The great accidental discovery occurred in winter 1839. In February
that year he just walked to a general store at Woburn to show his new rubber mixture.
Very excited and waving his hand, the substance fell from his hand and landed
on a hot potbellied stove. When he try to scrape the substance of the stove he made
a discovery. He found that that instead of rubber melting like molasses, it had
charred like leather. The rubber had become elastic. He discovered that heating
the rubber is the answer for the rubber to stay the same in winter and summer. The
winter after Goodyear’s discovery heat and sulfur miraculously changed rubber. And
Goodyear made remarkable discovery by inventing weatherproof rubber.
It was Goodyear who saw rubber as what we know it is today.
Rubber has been a versatile modern plastics. He suggested the same application of
rubber in 1850 as rubber paint, car springs, ferryboat bumpers, wheelbarrow
tires, inflatable life rafts, and “frogmen” suits” and many other recent
innovations he described a century ago (Goodyear Corporate, n.d). And now about 300,000
Americans earn their livelihoods in rubber manufacturing and rubber materials
worth $6 billion in the USA.
References
Goodyear Corporate. (n.d.).
Retrieved from https://corporate.goodyear.com/en-
US/about/history/charles-goodyear-story.htmlReferences
Muller, D (n.d) 24 Important
scientific discoveries that happened. Retrieved from
http://mentalfloss.com/article/53646/24-important-scientific-discoveries-happene
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