MCCORMICK AND GOODYEAR SECURE THEIR ROTUNDA FAME
Morse wouldn’t be the only inventor represented in the Rotunda. Because of the success of the reaper and vulcanized rubber, so also would McCormick and Goodyear.
In 1837, still unsure whether he could make a go of his reaper, McCormick tried to diversify his business interests. He turned to the iron furnace business, then became a victim of the great panic. With no other prospects for success, McCormick returned to his reaper, giving his full attention to catching up with Obed Hussey, who by now had proven he could sell his own, barely-workable reaper for a handsome profit. In 1840, McCormick announced his entry into the reaper game in Virginia.
The problem was that McCormick still didn’t have a reaper that he liked. And if he didn’t like it, neither would the farmers. So McCormick kept toying with his design. And while he did, Hussey pressed ahead with his own reaper—with essentially no competition. McCormick was furious. Not only had Hussey beaten McCormick to the patent office, he’d now beaten him in the market as well. By 1841 Hussey was selling in five states. McCormick now needed not only a functioning reaper, but one that was superior to Hussey’s.
And that is just what he did. Still, that didn’t make McCormick the inventor of the reaper, even though history has generally portrayed it that way. The truth is that McCormick was no more the inventor of the reaper than Isaac Singer was of the sewing machine. It was a collaborative effort by multiple inventors, each making his own improvements. By borrowing each other’s advances, they eventually developed a commercially workable machine. What McCormick excelled at was inventing the improvements that made the reaper commercially attractive to farmers. With improvements such as reciprocating blades shielded by metal fingers, a reel to bring the grains to the blades, a divider to isolate the grain, and a platform to hold the man gathering the cut grain, McCormick had a decided edge.
In 1844 McCormick, satisfied with his new and improved reaper, came up with the idea of challenging Hussey—his only real competitor—to a reaper’s duel. The competition turned out to be one-sided, with McCormick cutting seventeen acres to Hussey’s two. More important than the win was the publicity it generated. American farmers began to see the unbelievable efficiencies made possible by the reaper.
McCormick bolstered his market position when he recognized that the reaper was ill suited for the hilly Virginia terrain. He turned west, opening a new factory in Chicago in 1847, nearer to the flat, open prairie where the reaper excelled. At the time, Chicago had a population of just under ten thousand, and was thought of as a run-down cow town. To finance his operation, McCormick joined with the mayor of Chicago, William B. Ogden, who put up $25,000 for fifty percent ownership. They built a factory on the banks of the Chicago River.
Sales, however, were sluggish, not so much because other competitors were taking his market share, but because there simply was no market. McCormick had to convince farmers this was their future. McCormick well understood that having a great product, no matter how good the patent protection, does not generate sales by itself.
For that, McCormick invented a new business strategy: selling on credit. To advertise, McCormick set up harvesting competitions, pitting his reaper against anyone willing to take him on. McCormick’s reaper started gaining the attention of farmers, especially after a farmer named James Hite cut 175 acres in a week and exclaimed, “My reaper has more than paid for itself in one harvest.” McCormick used this to his advantage and signed up Hite and other farmers as his sales force.
McCormick also promoted sales by offering a written guarantee. With $30 down, McCormick collected another $90 only if the machine could cut a certain amount of grain in an hour. He marketed hard, taking out large advertisements with testimonials. Added to all this, McCormick bound his agents by exclusive contracts with exclusive territories.
Over time, his marketing and business strategies began paying off. During 1848, his first year in his new Chicago factory, McCormick produced a meager 100 reapers. That number quintupled to 500 by the next season. In 1851, McCormick was busy manufacturing 1,000 reapers, a number that would escalate to 23,000 by 1857, turning a handsome profit of $1.25 million.
Unfortunately for McCormick, when the first machines rolled off the line in 1848, his original patent had expired and Congress refused to grant an extension. As McCormick became successful, so did the competition, riding on McCormick’s success. Other competitors began testing the market and later proved to be much more astute than Hussey. In 1848 McCormick found at least 30 rivals in the field, a figure that would continue to escalate.
Fortunately, McCormick was a savvy businessman. He realized that he could not rest on his original patent rights because they had expired before the market had ever developed. Instead, he filed additional patents with each improvement, including two filed in 1845 and 1853, forming a legal iron fence around his reaper. These improvement patents turned out to be more valuable than his first because they covered concepts that made the reaper a practical farming implement. And those “improvement” patents would be the ones McCormick would assert against his competitors.
Goodyear had his own rags-to-riches story. After years of poverty and persistence, in 1837 Goodyear thought he had the solution to the rubber problem. He took out his first patent covering the use of nitric acid to process rubber. Although this process produced the best rubber so far, it still wasn’t commercially feasible—as Goodyear discovered when 150 mailbags ordered by the government melted to nothing.
Still, with his 1837 patent Goodyear found a backer in William Ballard that allowed him to move into a factory on Staten Island, this time bringing his family with him. But Goodyear wasn’t immune to the effects of the crash of 1837. Although Goodyear didn’t have any money to lose, his potential investors did. Forthcoming funds abruptly ended. Somehow, word of Goodyear’s experiments reached William Ely, who invested $10,000. But Goodyear ran out of money again, forcing his family in 1839 to sell off their possessions and landing him in debtor’s prison. At his lowest point, Goodyear received $50, barely enough to continue his work in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was here where Goodyear had his breakthrough. As legend has it, during a heated argument, Goodyear waved a rubber sample in his fist. It spurted out and landed on a heated pot-belly stove. When he scraped away the charred material it was dry and springy. Goodyear’s discovery was that rubber “carelessly brought into contact with the hot stove” turned into leather. It was the miracle cure for rubber, the magical treatment that would keep it from melting during the summer and becoming brittle in winter. A kind of pasteurization, but for rubber. It was the spark of an idea that led him to vulcanization—named after Vulcan, the Roman god of beneficial fire, who also made his way onto the Rotunda—and a newfound zeal.
Even with his prospects brightening, it took Goodyear until 1843 to work out his vulcanization process. He lodged his patent application the same year. The recipe called for 25 parts rubber, 5 parts sulfur, 7 parts lead, and turpentine heated to 270 degrees. His core patent issued June 15, 1844. That same day, Goodyear’s nemesis, Horace Day, was also busy at work attempting to obtain his own vulcanization patent.
The bad blood between Goodyear and Day had started years before. Although Goodyear knew his vulcanization process required high temperatures years before filing his patent application, he needed a commercial-sized furnace that could maintain these temperatures. How to maintain a precise, constant temperature to conduct his experiments proved to be a monumental problem. As a point of honor, Goodyear didn’t want to file a patent application until he was sure he had a commercial product. And it was the issue of the furnace that led to his chance meeting with Day, one that would haunt Goodyear for decades to come.
In 1841 Goodyear redesigned his oven so that it could reliably maintain elevated temperatures. It was an expensive proposition, but one that ultimately led to his next discovery: that for vulcanization, the temperature needed to be between 245 to 300 degrees F. The magic number turned out to be right at 270 degrees. To help pay for this redesign, Goodyear managed to convince the owner of the adjacent business, Horace Cutler, to pitch in $300. In return, the two men formed a joint venture to make rubber shoes. Cutler was evidently unaware that previous Goodyear investors had yet to receive any measurable returns on their investments. Still, Cutler put in his money, and when the first batches of shoes came out “half baked,” Cutler wanted out, and he wanted his money back. Of course, Goodyear didn’t have any money, so he did what he always did: He stalled, hoping to buy time and avoid another trip to debtor’s prison. His absent-mindedness to matters of finance plagued him his entire life, robbing him of a life of luxury. But to Goodyear, it was never about the money, only the invention. Goodyear’s altruism was no consolation for Cutler. As a last-ditch effort to recuperate his losses, Cutler sold the shoes, 95 of them, for $26 to a Mr. Horace Day of Brunswick, N. J. And that’s where Goodyear’s problems really began.
If Goodyear had known anything about Horace Day, he would have never let go of those ninety-five shoes. Day’s scandals included leaving his pregnant wife and five-year-old child to marry his own cousin. His Times obituary had nothing good to say about him, blasting his contentious litigation with Goodyear, the indisputable inventor of vulcanized rubber, his belief in Spiritualism where he claimed to talk with the dead, and his far-fetched businesses that gobbled up his rubber fortune, such as one that proposed to lay a pipeline four feet in diameter from Niagara Falls to New York to supply the city with pressurized air.
Goodyear had nothing of Day’s extravagance. He had the appearance of a grown-up Dickens’ character: slim build, clean shaven, coal black hair, and innocent eyes. And unlike Day and his escapades, Goodyear loved hard work and doting on his large family. Even so, as Day would discover, Goodyear had plenty of fight in him, too.
After receiving Cutler’s shipment of shoes, Day immediately struck up a correspondence and convinced Cutler to move to New Jersey to help him set up a competing shop, though Day may not have revealed his true intensions. They agreed on a salary of $30 per month and Cutler headed south. But after only a few months, Cutler became disillusioned with Day and his brash personality and wanted to return home. Day was furious when Cutler approached him with the news. Day was desperate to understand what Goodyear had discovered. Stay long enough to tell me Goodyear’s secrets, he demanded. Cutler finally capitulated to Day’s unrelenting demands and offered to divulge the factory secrets for $75. Day was appalled at the amount and bargained the price down to $50, and for that trivial sum, Day hacked his way into one of the greatest secrets of the nineteenth century. But even with the recipe, Day had problems making vulcanized rubber. The process didn’t seem to fall into place as Cutler had explained. In desperation, Day journeyed to Springfield incognito to visit Goodyear’s plant. The two met and Goodyear refused to let Day—or anyone else—inside the factory.
And while Day fretted about his own failures, life wasn’t getting much better for Goodyear. After redesigning his oven he was again out of money—taking another one of his many trips to debtor’s prison. After his release, Goodyear plodded ahead on a shoestring budget. Perfectionist until the end, Goodyear wasn’t yet ready to tell the world what he had discovered, and he refused to file his patent application until he was confident that every aspect of his vulcanization process was complete. From a legal perspective, it was a poor decision. Goodyear waited until 1844 to file his application, and the delay cost him his largest market. Across the ocean, England recognized patent rights based on the first person to file the application—not the first to invent the idea. Knowing this, Thomas Hancock, who reverse-engineered some of Goodyear’s rubber samples, filed his own application in England before Goodyear, essentially stealing the English market.
Meanwhile, Day, who still had Goodyear’s recipe, tried the same trick in the States and filed his own patent application. The idea was to try to get his own patent on somebody else’s invention, as in the days of Whitney. But Day’s application was brought to the attention of Henry Ellsworth, who recognized the scheme. It was just this type of fraud he’d set out to stop with the Patent Act of 1836. On June 15, 1844, the same day Goodyear’s patent issued, U.S. patent commissioner Henry Ellsworth rejected Day’s application, citing Goodyear’s application, which had been filed the previous January. “Your application for Letters Patent, for an alleged improvement in preparing India rubber, has been examined, and rejected for want of novelty. An application for a patent for a similar process to yours was made on January last, by Charles Goodyear, of New York.”
That didn’t stop Day’s shenanigans. He simply starting knocking off Goodyear’s shirred rubber goods, regardless of who held the patent. Shirred rubber goods, including stockings, caps and gloves, constituted a substantial market. These goods were made by gluing a previously stretched, thin rubber strip between two pieces of cloth, then allowing the strips to contract (shirring the cloth). In retaliation, Goodyear sued Day in both 1844 and 1845. As Singer would do to Howe in the sewing machine wars, Day worked to manipulate public opinion against Goodyear, taking out slanderous newspaper advertisements. Day had the audacity to claim that Goodyear wasn’t really the inventor of vulcanized rubber, claiming that credit should go to a man named Hayward, one of Goodyear’s research assistants. Goodyear responded in kind, publishing a statement that he could produce any number of witnesses to contradict Day. Then Goodyear took one final jab. Because he was too busy inventing and didn’t have time to monitor the scoundrel’s daily attacks, he claimed, he concluded, “I cannot expect to look after his notorious bulletins Day after Day.”
The rhetoric continued for the next year. In an about-face, right before the trail began in November, 1846, Day agreed to settle. This time, Day published another notice that he and Goodyear had settled their differences and that Day now had a license to produce shirred goods under Goodyear’s patent. Day continued with his publications, offering a $50 reward for anyone who would identify an infringer.
What Goodyear would soon learn is that Day never had any intention of paying Goodyear under the license, even for the mere pittance of three cents per yard. Moreover, Day wasn’t about to limit himself to producing only shirred goods. Anything with rubber it in was fair game. Who cared about Goodyear’s patent?
Day’s next foray was into rubber shoes, which he marketed as “Day’s Best Patent Japan Rubber Shoes,” a clear belittlement of Goodyear’s India rubber shoes. The two were headed for another showdown.