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Noble Obsession by Charles Slack, Theia Books, New York, $24.95, ISBN 0786867892 Reviewed by Mick Hamer

RAW rubber is pretty useless. It’s sticky when it’s hot and cracks up when it’s cold. It was only when the American inventor Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanisation that rubber became the practical industrial product that we know so well today.

For five long years Goodyear worked his way through the periodic table trying to find an additive that would make rubber stable. The breakthrough came in 1839, when he added sulphur and baked the samples in his wife’s kitchen stove.

Charles Slack’s absorbing book Noble Obsession reveals a harrowing life. Goodyear’s experiments impoverished his family. The noxious chemicals ruined his health, and he was in and out of the debtors’ prison.

But, far from making him wealthy, the discovery only increased his problems. An English industrialist worked out the process and patented it in England before Goodyear could. And an American rip-off artist made a fortune infringing Goodyear’s American patent. The court battles that followed used up much of the income from that and other patents.

But Goodyear made matters worse by his complete lack of business sense. Perhaps the most telling story in the book describes how Napoleon III honoured Goodyear in 1855 for his achievements. Goodyear was unable to attend the ceremony: he was in Clichy, the Paris debtors’ prison. When he died in 1860, he left debts of $191,000.