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In Ohio History we cover the famous and important locations in Ohio. I created a slideshow on
Goodyear Tires. Goodyear is an important place in Ohio located in Akron. Akron as we see
in red on the map is located in North east Ohio. Here is an overhead view of the Goodyear
plant in Akron. Goodyear was founded by Frank Seiberling in 1898. Mr. Seiberling purchased
the company’s first plant with a $3,500 dollar down payment. The land that he bought
was family owned property and consisted of 7 acres. Here we have a picture of a horseless
carriage. The horseless carriage and the bicycle helped to get the company started. David E.
Hill became the company’s first president when he purchased $30,000 of stock. Seiberling
created the trademark symbol, as we see here, of the winged foot and selected the name for
the company. The company was named after Charles Goodyear because he invented vulcanized rubber
in 1839. Charles Goodyear created the vulcanization process after working at creating a more stable
rubber for five years. His invention started when he walked into the Roxbury India Rubber
Co in New York. He showed the owner of the store a valve he has made for rubber life
preservers, but the owner was not interested. He showed Goodyear why when he pointed to
shelves full of rubber items that were melted because of weather. The company was probably
going under because of all of the trouble their customers were having. Soon after Good
year was put in jail for debt and his wife brought him raw rubber and a rolling pin to
work with while he was in. When he left jail him and his family moved to New York where
he rented out a fourth floor apartment and made it his rubber laboratory. He was determined
to create the rubber even though family members were telling him the rubber was dead and his
children were hungry. Goodyear painted, gilded and embossed his samples as he was working.
One day he decided he wanted to use an old sample so he used nitric acid to remove the
bronze paint and it turned the piece black, so he threw it away. Days later he took the
piece of rubber out of the trash and determined that this rubber felt different and that the
nitric acid has done something good to this rubber. He later found that that rubber too
would eventually melt. Goodyear began adding sulfur to his experiments. No one is quite
sure how it happened, but the story is that Goodyear went into a store to show his latest
rubber invention and was waving his gum in the air and it flew from his fingers to a
hot stove where it became hard and around the edge was a brown rim. He finally created
weatherproof rubber on accident. He wrote to his wealthy brother in law in New York
and production started. Goodyear’s health was failing rapidly. When he died in 1860
he was $200,000 in debt. In 1925 Goodyear blimps took the sky as advertisement if the
rubber company. One of the 3 blimps is stored in Ohio and is named the Spirit of Goodyear.
The company started off with 13 employees. The 2005 CNN Money on the Fortune Global 500
showed 80,000 employees. The employees worked 10 hour days for 13 to 25 cents an hour. Production
started November 21, 1898 with the bicycle, horseshoe pads, poker chips and carriage tires.
In 1926 Goodyear became the rubber capital of the world.