It was when the business had reached this flourishing stage that Charles Goodyear, a bankrupt hardware merchant of Philadelphia, first had his attention directed to the material upon which it was founded.  In 1834, being in New York on business, he chanced to observe the sign of the Roxbury Company, which then had a depot in that city.  He had been reading in the newspapers, not long before, descriptions of the new life-preservers made of India-rubber, an application of the gum that was much extolled.  Curiosity induced him to enter the store to examine the life-preservers.  He bought one and took it home with him.  A native of Connecticut, he possessed in full measure the Yankee propensity to look at a new contrivance, first with a view to understand its principle, and next to see if it cannot be improved.  Already he had had some experience both of the difficulty of introducing an improved implement, and of the profit to be derived from its introduction.  His father, the head of the firm of A. Goodyear and Sons, of which he was a member, was the first to manufacture hay-forks of spring steel, instead of the heavy, wrought-iron forks made by the village blacksmith; and Charles Goodyear could remember the time when his father reckoned it a happy day on which he had persuaded a farmer to accept a few of the new forks as a gift, on the condition of giving them a trial.  But it was also very fresh in his recollection that those same forks had made their way to almost universal use, had yielded large profits to his firm, and were still a leading article of its trade, when, in 1830, the failure of Southern houses had compelled it to suspend.  He was aware, too, that, if anything could extricate the house of A. Goodyear and Sons from embarrassment, it was their possession of superior methods of manufacturing and their sale of articles improved by their own ingenuity.

Upon examining his life-preserver, an improvement in the inflating apparatus occurred to him.  When he was next in New York he explained his improvement to the agent of the Roxbury Company, and offered to sell it.  The agent, struck with the ingenuity displayed in the new contrivance, took the inventor into his confidence, partly by way of explaining why the Company could not then buy the improved tube, but principally with a view to enlist the aid of an ingenious mind in overcoming a difficulty that threatened the Company with ruin.  He told him that the prosperity of the India-rubber Companies in the United States was wholly fallacious.  The Roxbury Company had manufactured vast quantities of shoes and fabrics in the cool months of 1833 and 1834, which had been readily sold at high prices; but during the following summer, the greater part of them had melted.  Twenty thousand dollars’ worth had been returned, reduced to the consistency of common gum, and emitting an odor so offensive that they had been obliged to bury it.  New ingredients had been employed, new machinery applied, but still the articles would dissolve.