Charles Goodyear, who had developed vulcanization twenty…

Charles Goodyear, who had developed vulcanization twenty years earlier, has seen several competitors infringe on his patent rights and gain substantial profits from his discovery.

Having spent some of the past two decades in debtors’ prisons, he travels in 1860 to see his dying daughter in New York, but is informed on arrival that she has already died.

He collapses and is taken to the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City, where he dies, broke, at the age of fifty-nine.