Fortes Auto Body Inc.

We Get Never Tired of the BF Goodrich Story

Benjamin Franklin Goodrich (1841 –1888, aka "B.F.")was an American icon--an industrialist in the rubber industry and the founding of the famous B.F. Goodrich Company. If you have ever purchased tires (and who hasn't?), there is a fairly good chance that you bought them from the B.F. Goodrich Company. The brand name Goodrich now can be found on tires made by Michelin, which acquired the Uniroyal-B. F. Goodrich tire business in 1994.

At Fortes Auto Body Inc. , we are happy to share with you this blog about a pioneer in the manufacturing and marketing of tires--B.F. Goodrich, one of the best well-known names in the history of automobiles in the U.S. Cars in Sunnyvale, CA and nationwide rely on radial tires, which were invented by Goodrich's company

Goodrich was born is the farming town of Ripley, NY and he was orphaned at the age eight, so he was raised by his uncle.

Most people don't realize that Goodrich was actually a physician. He earned his M.D. from Cleveland Medical College and studied surgery at the University of Pennsylvania in 1863 and served as a battlefront surgeon for the Union Army during the the Civil War. After a working in an unsuccessful medical practice, Goodrich gave up his medical career and went to work in Pennsylvania's oil fields and eventually became a very rich real estate speculator.

After the Civil War ended, Goodrich signed a licensing agreement with Charles Goodyear and acquired the Hudson River Rubber Company in a partnership with J.P. Morris in 1869. The new company was originally in Melrose, NY and it promptly failed. The following year, Goodrich accepted an offer of $13,600 from the people of Akron, Ohio to move his factory there.

He founded Goodrich, Tew & Co. in 1870 and Goodrich eventually bought out Tew. In 1880 the company became the B.F. Goodrich Company, the name it held until 1994.

As a well-known industrialist, B.F. Goodrich enjoyed a life full of wonderful bonuses. He was the first person in Ohio to own a telephone, which he received from Alexander Graham Bell for his birthday in 1877. By using the telephone could call his factory on Rubber Street without leaving his house.

The very first products were tires, but also a wide range of other rubber products. According a story, Goodrich saw a close friend's house burn to the ground. The firefighters on the scene were helpless to save the home, because their leather hoses were completely frozen and cracking.

After seeing this tragic scenario, Goodrich ordered his company to start making cotton-wrapped rubber hoses that wouldn't freeze. Several years later, Goodrich began manufacturing garden hoses and bicycle tires. Still, the company wasn't flourishing and when Goodrich died at the age of 46 in 1888 his company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

But, business grew and started making huge profits at B.F. Goodrich Company a few years after Goodrich's death with its introduction of a pneumatic tire that could tolerate the speed and load of the quickly evolving automobile. In the next subsequent decades, chemists at the Goodrich Company created plasticized polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in 1926, synthesized rubber in 1937 and fabricated space suits for NASA's astronauts in the 1960s.

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Sources: Forbes, AOL and Wikipedia