Overview

The Race To Create Rubber: The Miracle Substance Of The Industrial Age; Rubber was to the 1830s what the Internet boom was to the 1990s: a flawed but potentially world-altering discovery that made and destroyed fortunes. It took the vision, courage, and perseverance of one man - Charles Goodyear to reinvent rubber into the indispensable substance it is today. Noble Obsession is the riveting work of history that reads like enthralling fiction. It tells how Goodyear, a single-minded genius, risked his own life and his family's in a quest to unlock the secrets of rubber, and how Thomas Hancock, the scholarly English inventor who raced against Goodyear ultimately robbed him of fame and fortune. Filled with villains, con men, and entrepreneurs, and brimming with fascinating facts about the science and business of rubber, Noble Obsession takes readers from the jungles of Brazil to the laboratories of Europe to the courtrooms of America to tell one of the strangest and most affecting sagas in the history of human discovery.

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9780786867899

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Reviews

A fresh, frisky, and funny bio cum industrial history featuring the stereotypical monomaniacal inventor who ignores public opinion and the disdain of family and friends and lives long enough to enjoy seeing them all dine on substantial portions of crow. Slack (Blue Fairways, 1999) points out several times that Charles Goodyear (1800-60) died before the birth of the tire and rubber company that still bears his name; a lovely concluding sentence notes how much the inventor would have enjoyed riding in a blimp bearing his name over a football stadium, watching thousands of fans (all wearing rubber-soled shoes) cheering teams bashing each other for the possession of a ball made in part of vulcanized rubber. Goodyear's story is often about bashings of various sorts. Family, friends, creditors, and health all came second to his obsession with finding a way to prevent rubber from melting in heat and freezing in cold. Goodyear resided in debtors' prison on numerous occasions, including a stint in Paris, where awards for his rubber products at the World's Fair were delivered to him in his cell. The inventor also had a number of odious antagonists and a wide array of unprincipled rivals who left no ethic unsullied in their attempts to steal his process (later dubbed vulcanization by another) and to profit from his years of experimentation, frustration, and failure. In one spectacular trial, the Goodyear forces, led by chief attorney Daniel Webster in his final courtroom appearance, defeated Horace Day, an unsavory competitor who harassed Goodyear throughout his life-and beyond. Freelance journalist Slack keeps the narrative humming along, effortlessly tossing off clever lines yet keeping in the foreground at all times the astonishing devotion and accomplishments of the man whose discoveries made possible balloons, tires, rubber bands, and blimps. Goodyear himself never realized more than a modest income from his work and died deeply in debt. Brisk, bouncy, elastic, and exciting. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Charles Slack is the author of Blue Fairways. He has written for Esquire, Men's Journal Hemispheres, Reader's Digest, and Travel & Leisure Golf. Before becoming a full-time freelance writer in 1998, he was an award-winning business reporter and feature writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

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