Historedia
Episode 2 of 2

Patent Grant

When
1844
Where
United States Patent Office
Part of
Charles Goodyear vulcanizes rubber

Goodyear patented the vulcanization process in 1844, enabling industrial production despite earlier British patents.

Goodyear worked out a consistent system for hardening rubber and patented the process in 1844, producing rubber on an industrial scale. Supplied passages disagree on the exact US patent date: one records patent number 3633 granted on June 15, 1844, while another gives the US patent date as 30 January 1844. This followed Thomas Hancock's British patent in November 1843, raising questions about whether Hancock's work was informed by Goodyear's samples.

Sources

  1. Vulcanization Wikipedia, revision of 2026-08-26
  2. Charles Goodyear Wikipedia, revision of 2026-06-28

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.