Having developed a process to vulcanize rubber to metal, Conn soon started manufacturing his mouthpieces, at first in humble premises over a drugstore in Elkhart, Indiana. The story goes that Conn devised his original mouthpiece after suffering a split lip in a bar brawl and, wanting to continue to play cornet in a local band, came up with a rubber rimmed mouthpiece ('a cushion for the lips,' Conn called it) that enabled him to play comfortably. As a 21 year old Civil War veteran, Conn invented a brass mouthpiece in 1874 for which patents were soon granted.
Charles Gerard Conn was born in upstate New York in 1844.