This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And this is not the episode I set out to

write. So funny. I was going to do an episode on sneaker history. Listen, I'm probably still will.

I still love shoes. But one of the things that I wanted to do in setting up that episode

was to talk about Charles Goodyear

because his work really led to the development of the sneaker industry

because they need those souls.

Like, that's the distinguishing characteristic of sneakers.

And he had come up on our episode on raincoat history, but we didn't go

very deep into his life story. And his work is really very important to a lot of the things

that we have in the 21st century. It was, as I said, very pivotal to the development of the

sneaker, but in the process of trying to give him some time

for a little mini biography at the front end of that episode, I just realized he had to end up

being the whole episode because I was intrigued, not in always a great way. I was also really

frustrated. You're going to see, you also will be frustrated with this man.

Charles Good here is often described as a chemist, and I guess you could say that. It doesn't seem

quite accurate to me because he was not the kind of chemist who was seeking to understand

molecular science. He wasn't developing formulas. We talked about so many people in that raincoat episode

...