TL;DR: Charles Goodyear invented the process which enabled modern rubber products, primarily tires. He is a Salem Witch, so mark that with “or so we are told”. We’ll examine the birth of the industry, the genealogies of Goodyear and the founder of Goodyear (two different people!), and the Salem Witch connections of Goodyear’s career.

If you examine the current list of tire companies, you’ll see the trade is quite international, with many major manufacturers in Asia. It has only been that way since the early 1990’s or so. American cars used to run on American tires.

I had planned to cover the best-known American tire manufacturers from before globalization, which off the top of my head were Goodyear, Firestone, and BFGoodrich. So much evidence turned up along the way that each will require a separate post plus a couple more.

We have to begin before the beginning with this fact: all of those three tire companies plus one other prominent manufacturer were founded in Akron, Ohio. That seems very bizarre, doesn’t it? I suppose you could wave your hands around and come up with a reason, but the instant counterarguments are that it would be ad hoc and ex post facto. Wikipedia doesn’t even offer a reason, saying only this:

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Akron became a center of rubber and tire manufacturing; it was the headquarters of B.F. Goodrich, Firestone, General Tire, and Goodyear (which is still based in the city) and was nicknamed the "Rubber Capital of the World".

Are there rubber tree forests covering Ohio that I don’t know about? Did ships full of latex from the Amazon dock at the port of land-locked Akron? Did the University of Akron have a focus on polymer science in the early 1800’s? No, these ideas are absurd.

So is there anything suspicious about Akron? You know it, dawg. The founder was named Simon Perkins (1771-1844). Let’s do the formal genealogy some other day, so let this quote from Wikipedia suffice for now:

Simon was descended from one of the oldest English Puritan families of New England, and his ancestry went back to John Perkins who came to the new world with Roger Williams in 1631.

That would be the same Roger Williams who, in a famous bullshit narrative, got kicked out of Salem in 1635 then went and founded Rhode Island with Benedict Arnold (great-grandfather of the famous traitor).

The Perkinses were heavily involved in the opium trade back in the day, and we discussed that in posts on the Opium Wars and on the Forbes family. Founding a city as a Salem Witch proprietary—which later was to house the tire industry—is tame by comparison.

Tires manufactured by the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company were pervasive for quite a long time. The company was founded in 1898 by someone not named Goodyear. Very odd, right? We’ll come back to the source of the company name, but we need to stop and examine the actual founder of the company.

Let me set this up by reminding you that in the post on German auto manufacturers, we discussed how the people that came to pioneer that industry had—decades before, of course—been born in the area of Frankfurt and Stuttgart, with the latter being where most of the industry ended up.

So wouldn’t it be coincidental if I told you that the founder of Goodyear, Franklin Augustus Seiberling (1859-1955), was a descendant of German immigrants? Well, he was!

Now I don’t necessarily offer this as proof of anything, but you may find it funny that Frank’s alma mater was Heidelberg College. That’s in Ohio, not Germany. The original Heidelberg in Germany is… halfway between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. Funny, right?

But we really should examine his genealogy more closely. Begin at the page for Franklin Augustus (Frank) "F. A." Seiberling and you can click back in time to his 3g-grandfather and the original immigrant ancestor, Christian Seiberling (1731-1816). There are some important notes about him.

First, Private Christian Seiberling served with Northampton County Militia of Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War. That’s turning out to be really “on brand” for these Salem Witches and—as I have remarked before—makes me mistrust the patriotic narratives we have been handed about that period of history.

Second, Christian was born in "Ellmendingen, Pforzheim, Baden, Heiliges Römisches Reich". It’s so tiny you’ll have to look it up under the modern Keltern, Enz, Baden-Württemberg. Roughly, though, it’s about 27mi WNW of… Stuttgart. Are you even surprised at this point? I offer this fact as proof he was “in on it” and an emissary of the Frankfurter Hexen.

The third point follows from the second. I do not have the year of Christian’s immigration but let’s say he was 20. So Christian leaves the Stuttgart area and more than a century later, his 3g-grandson is born in Western Star, Ohio. That’s on the western outskirts of Akron. When he’s about 40, he founds a tire company. Quite the coincidence, huh? An alternative explanation is that “They” play a very long game.

Returning to the founding of the company, it was named after Charles Nelson Goodyear (1800-1860). In 1839, he invented a process for hardening rubber known as “vulcanization” which made tires practical, among many other applications. As you can see, the company was founded almost 40 years after he died. The question arises, though: was Goodyear himself a Salem Witch?

On the “Ancestors” for Charles Nelson Goodyear, I keyed on three candidate Salem Witch names: his mother Cynthia (Bateman) Goodyear (1776-1845), his maternal grandmother Eunice (Curtiss) Bateman (1748-1804), and his 2g-grandmother Elizabeth (Wright) Bateman (1664 - abt.1735).

Curtis and Wright are indeed Salem Witch names and I probed around but could not find the direct genealogical links. But you can see the common source in those names is a man named Eleazer Bateman Sr. (1664-1751).

Eleazar’s brother was Thomas Bateman (1652-1727). Wikipedia has no reference to anyone by that name, but that’s another fail since there are Case files referencing Thomas Bateman. You can see he’s of the appropriate age range, but do we have the right man?

Thomas’ second marriage was to Ruth (Wright) Bateman (1646-1715). It took place In 1685 in (drum roll) Salem. Ruth had a son from a previous marriage named Jonathan Knight II (1672-1711). Wikipedia’s list mentions only Margaret, but the records show there were four Knights at Salem. You can confirm the hit with Case files referencing Jonathan Knight.

BTW, the “(Wright) Bateman” part of Ruth and Elizabeth’s names is no coincidence. Thomas and Eleazar were brothers, and Ruth and Elizabeth were aunt and niece (respectively), being the sister the daughter (respectively) of one man, Joseph Wright Sr. (bef. 1641 - 1724). Tight little group.

Also, there are three Wrights listed in the records: John, Mercy, and Walter. I cannot connect them genealogically but it would be an astounding coincidence if they were not related, don’t you think? I found where I believe there was a bastard Wright early on and they severed the genealogical connection, but we won’t get into that now.

Which segues us into a whole section where we “won’t get into it”. That is, the subject of the Salem Witches can be likened to a 4-dimensional spiderweb. Here we have a number of threads leading off to other parts of the web, but we will not crawl out along them. All these threads serve to reiterate that we are, in fact, on a spiderweb. Or they are mere coincidence. You decide. The first is from Seiberling’s Wikipedia page:

While Seiberling and his brother Charles were the co-founders of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, its first president was David E. Hill, a business associate who purchased $30,000 of the company's initial stock.

Hill is a Salem Witch name we’ve never covered, but there are three people named Hill in the records and one named Hills. Wikipedia actually bests the records in one way. The court records list “Elenor Babson” while Wikipedia lists “Eleanor Hill-Babson” under “Afflicted”. Add one Hill to the tally.

His father was a descendant of Stephen Goodyear, successor to Governor Eaton as the head of the company London Merchants, who founded the colony of New Haven in 1638.

Eaton is a Salem Witch name. I missed this connection in the genealogical research, so I propose that Goodyear is also a Salem Witch name.

In 1855, in the last of three patent disputes with fellow British rubber pioneer, Stephen Moulton….

We discussed the Moultons in the post on Linda Moulton Howe. In an update to that post, Seth Moulton is still the sitting Congressman representing MA-6, which includes Salem. He is currently campaigning for Senate. BTW, he returned the AIPAC donations he received, which keeps the Salem Witches laughing at everyone still backwards enough to believe it’s all down to “Da Joos”.

In 1839, Goodyear was at the Eagle India Rubber Company in Woburn, Massachusetts, where he discovered that combining rubber and sulfur over a hot stove caused the rubber to become rigid, a process which he called vulcanization because of the heat involved.

Eureka, eh? Goodyear even has an elementary school named after him there. He moved around a lot, though, and has no other history with the town. Happenstance? Well, Tom and Eleazar and Ruth and Elizabeth who we mentioned earlier were all born in Woburn, Massachusetts. So no, not happenstance.

Goodyear sold some of these patents to Hiram Hutchinson who founded Hutchinson SA in France in 1853.

Hutchinson SA is today a diversified multinational operating in 26 countries with over 40,000 employees. Hutchinson is a Salem Witch name.

Lastly, I find it anomalous that Seiberling chose the name of Goodyear for his company—for any conventional reason, that is. How many people even today are familiar with either vulcanization or Charles Goodyear? The closest comparison I can think of is that Tesla Motors was named about 60 years after the death of Nikola Tesla. Even if people aren’t familiar with the inventor, they know what cars and electricity are. There is also no relationship between Seiberling and Goodyear.

Unless they’re both Salem Witches, of course. If you go by the mainstream narrative, Goodyear was talented and hard-working, but he did not have an easy go of it. He died deeply in debt at the age of 59. I say all this because I ponder whether his work came too early to be of personal benefit and naming the company after him was some sort of recompense, Who knows?

Bonus: There was a surname you may have noticed on the “Ancestors” tab for Charles Goodyear. If so, I did too and thought I’d follow up on it for you.

Sperry “Top-Siders” became popularized as the preferred footwear for the “preppy” look as far back as the 1980’s. If you’re dressing up for a throwback party, they are a “must have” for authenticity. They were made by Sperry, of course. They still are, except Sperry is now a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group (<- see what I was saying?).

Sperry was founded in 1935 by Paul A. Sperry (1895-1982). Paul’s 6g-grandfather, the original immigrant and the man who carried the name into the New World, was Richard Sperry (abt. 1606 - 1698).

The woman I thought you may have noticed was Charles’ great-grandmother, Esther (Sperry) Goodyear (abt. 1704 - 1760). Her grandfather was that same Richard Sperry. Also note that both Charles Goodyear and Paul Sperry were born in New Haven, Connecticut. Coincidentally, of course.

The original purpose of “Top-Siders” was as boat shoes, designed with a specially-cut non-slip sole made of rubber. “Top-side”, get it? My point, however, is the rubber aspect. No one seems to have noted Sperry’s connection to Goodyear. You see, even when there is no “conspiracy” per se, researchers do a terrible job of noticing things. Never assume they have or ever will.

Thanks for reading!