Charles Goodyear gave the modern world one of its most important materials and got almost nothing for it. In 1839, after years of obsessive and impoverishing experiments, he stumbled on the process of vulcanization — treating rubber with sulfur and heat so that it stayed strong and stable in heat and cold instead of melting into a stinking goo or cracking solid. It was the discovery that turned India rubber from a useless novelty into the foundation of a colossal industry: tires, hoses, belts, seals, insulation, footwear. Goodyear himself spent his life in poverty, in and out of debtors’ prison, and died in 1860 owing some two hundred thousand dollars.
The discovery was, by his own account, partly an accident — a piece of sulfur-treated rubber that landed on a hot stove and charred rather than melted, hinting that controlled heat held the key. But the years of misery before and after it were no accident. Goodyear had no business sense, no capital, and a near-religious conviction that the world owed him the chance to keep experimenting. He licensed his patents cheaply, defended them ruinously, and died before the industry he had created made anyone but his rivals and lawyers rich.
His patent, granted in 1844, should have made him wealthy. Instead it made him a perpetual litigant. Imitators sprang up immediately, and Goodyear spent his remaining years and most of his money suing them. The high point was the 1852 “Great India Rubber Case,” Goodyear v. Day, in which the famous statesman Daniel Webster argued on Goodyear’s behalf in Trenton — and reportedly took a fee larger than Goodyear had earned from the invention in his entire life.
The final irony is the one most people know without knowing it. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was founded in 1898 — thirty-eight years after Charles Goodyear’s death — and named in his honor by a man with no connection to him or his family. Goodyear the company became a global giant. Goodyear the inventor left his family deep in debt, having proved that being the one who changes the world and being the one who profits from it are very different things.
John Law was a Scottish gambler, theorist, and convicted duelist who talked his way into control of an entire nation’s finances and, for a dizzying few months, became perhaps the wealthiest private individual in the world. Between 1716 and 1720 he founded France’s first central bank, took over the trading monopoly for France’s vast Louisiana territory, and merged the two into a single colossus whose shares he sold to a public gripped by speculative fever. At the peak in late 1719 and early 1720, the mania he engineered minted overnight fortunes, gave the French language its word for a ‘millionaire,’ and made Law himself Controller General of the Finances of France — the kingdom’s chief economic officer.
The scheme rested on a genuinely modern and genuinely fragile idea: that paper money and bank credit, properly managed, could stimulate trade and replace the chronic shortage of gold and silver coin. Law’s bank issued notes, his company issued shares, and the two propped each other up — the bank’s notes were used to buy the shares, and the rising shares justified printing more notes. As long as confidence held, the spiral lifted everything. The moment confidence faltered, the same linkage ran in reverse with terrifying speed.
In 1720 it faltered. As insiders cashed out and converted paper into hard coin and land, the share price began to fall; Law’s attempts to prop it up by decree — restricting coin, forcing acceptance of paper, then abruptly devaluing both shares and notes — only accelerated the panic. The Mississippi Bubble burst, wiping out a generation of French investors, discrediting paper money in France for decades, and shattering Law’s own immense fortune almost as fast as he had built it.
Stripped of office and reviled, Law fled France at the end of 1720 with little more than he had arrived with. He spent his last years wandering Europe and gambling for a living, and died in Venice in 1729, poor and largely forgotten — the architect of one of the first great financial bubbles, undone by the very mechanism he had invented.
Ludwig II came to the throne of Bavaria in 1864 at the age of eighteen, a strikingly handsome and intensely romantic young man with little taste for the duties of state and a consuming passion for art, music, and architecture. Over the next two decades he poured his wealth into two enthusiasms above all others: the operas of Richard Wagner, whom he rescued from his creditors and bankrolled for years, and a series of extravagant fantasy palaces — Neuschwanstein, Linderhof, and Herrenchiemsee — built to satisfy a private vision of medieval and Bourbon splendor rather than any public need.
Crucially, Ludwig financed these projects not from the Bavarian state treasury but from his own civil list — the personal income granted to the crown — and, when that ran out, from a mounting pile of personal loans. By the mid-1880s his debts had reached roughly 14 million marks, an enormous sum, and he was demanding that his ministers raise still more, threatening to dismiss the entire government when they balked. The building never stopped; Linderhof was completed, Neuschwanstein and Herrenchiemsee remained unfinished, and the king’s appetite for new and grander schemes showed no sign of slowing.
Unable to control the king’s spending or to extract more credit, Ludwig’s ministers moved against him in June 1886. They assembled a medical commission, headed by the psychiatrist Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, which declared Ludwig insane — paranoid and unfit to rule — without, by most accounts, ever personally examining him. On that basis he was deposed and placed under custody at Berg Castle on the shore of Lake Starnberg.
Three days later, on the evening of June 13, 1886, Ludwig and Dr. von Gudden went for a walk along the lake and never returned. Both were found dead in the shallow water hours later, in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained and remain disputed to this day — officially ruled a drowning, variously suspected to have been suicide, an escape attempt gone wrong, or even murder. The castles that ruined and arguably killed him became, within a generation, among the most visited and most profitable tourist attractions in Germany.