How did Charles Goodyear accidentally invent vulcanized rubber?
Charles Goodyear had been working for years to invent heat-resistant rubber, a kind of rubber that could be put to practical uses. (The kind of rubber available at that time was prone to cracking and melting – thoroughly useless). Eventually, he succeeded, but only as the result of an accident: he dropped his experiment (rubber mixed with sulphur) on a hot stove and the heat it was subjected to turned out to be the missing ingredient he’d been searching for. There are two legends about Goodyear’s famous accident. One says he was trying to hide his experiment from his fed-up wife (she was sick of his time-consuming tinkering with rubber and wanted him to get a paying job). Another legend says the mixture got dropped onto the hot stove as a result of his excitement in showing it to somebody. Goodyear himself denied his discovery was an accident, but the legends persist.
