July 18, 2026 • 39 mins
This 2023 episode covers how humans have worked on ways to make garments water resistant almost since they started to wear them. But figuring out how to manufacture a raincoat using rubber was a big breakthrough that took centuries.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. After this week's episode on Charles Goodyear and
the invention of vulcanized rubber, we're re airing an episode
on the history of something that was dramatically impacted by
that breakthrough, and that's the raincoat. This originally came out
January twenty third, twenty twenty three. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff
(00:23):
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. So, Tracy, I'm sure you have heard
of a jacket being called a Macintosh Uh huh, and
(00:44):
these days lots of jackets are called that. It became
kind of a generic always correctly, it really means a raincoat,
and if you want to get granular, it means a
specific kind and brand of raincoat. And that's because it's
actually named for the man who is usually credited with
inventing the modern raincoat, and that was Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh.
(01:05):
But as with just about any invention, it is not
as though he came up with the idea out of
thin air. Humans have worked on ways to make garments
water resistant almost since they started wearing them. Whale intestines,
woven grass and leaves, animal firs, tightly woven woolf fibers,
and even oiled and waxed fabrics have been used around
(01:26):
the world by various peoples to try to keep the
rain and moisture at bay. But figuring out how to
manufacture clothes with rubber was a really big breakthrough that
took actually kind of centuries. People really wanted to figure
out the rubber puzzle. I really love looking at pictures
of the various kinds of rainwear that different cultures have
(01:50):
developed around the world. Some of them are just so
fascinating to me. In terms of what we're talking about today.
There are accounts that indicate that indigitious peoples in the
Americas used the natural rubber from trees in a lot
of different ways and were applying rubber to their clothing
as a waterproofing tool well before Europeans arrived in the Americas.
(02:16):
Then Europeans, particularly Spanish and Portuguese explorers, adopted this same practice.
It was not something that they brought back home with
them to Europe. Though, rubber did not really become something
that Europeans paid a lot of attention to until the
mid eighteenth century, when French botanist Francois Fresnou de la
(02:37):
Gatorier started writing about it after spending time studying the
plants in French Guiana for a note. Actually wrote about
the possibility of combining rubber with textiles to create waterproof
clothing as early as seventeen forty nine. But though Freno
and other Europeans who had visited the Americas had seen
(02:57):
this application and had even used it themselves, you would think,
of course they would want to bring that back to Europe,
But the problem was transport. Although the scientific community of
Europe was really eager to experiment with cowed schuk as
it was known in Frenot's writing and often for a
long time, it couldn't really be stabilized for transport, and
(03:18):
so reportedly that raw material would coagulate on the voyage
across the Atlantic. For Reneau thought that rubber could be
combined with turpentine as a solvent, but that actually caused
it to break down, and it introduced oxygen into the mix,
and it just further degraded it. So enter a repeat
character from the podcast, that is Jacques de Vocsal of
(03:40):
the pooping robot Duck Automats of fame. He was really
fascinated with rubber, and he's often credited with creating the
first rubber tube, which he used in that duck. He
was one of the more prominent scientists of the seventeen
hundreds who was talking to colleagues about the potential of
using rubber in a variety of applications. That certainly increased
(04:03):
its profile as a subject of interest. He also communicated
the importance of this line of scientific research in the
early seventeen sixties. He did that when talking to aure
Leonard Jean Baptiste Bertin, who at the time was King
Louis the fifteenth of France's finance minister. Yeah, he was like,
we should really put some money behind this research, shouldn't we.
(04:26):
It's very cool. But it took several more years for
the next link in the chain, meaning another scientist, to
propose another solvent that would make rubber into a substance
that could be used for a wide range of practical applications.
That was the work of French chemist Pierre Joseph Macaire.
Despite being very busy in the seventeen sixties, writing the
(04:48):
historically significant Dictionary of Chemistry. He also wanted to crack
the problem of a solvent for rubber, and he proposed
ether as another solvent option, and presented his work to
the Academy Descience in seventeen sixty eight, but ether was
far too expensive to really ever do anything at a
large scale. In seventeen seventy nine, an Italian botanist and
(05:11):
chemist named Giovanni Valentino Mattia Fabroni of Florence picked up
this effort. As a young scientist, Fabroni had traveled to
Paris and London at the behest of Tuscany nobility, and
had collected instruments for a new laboratory. That laboratory evolved
into the Science Museum of Florence. During these trips, Fabroni
(05:33):
of course met other scientists, and it's believed that that's
when he became interested in rubber. It was a few
years after that initial supply run that Fabroni was back
in London, and through experimentation he identified petroleum distillate or naphtha,
as a solvent for rubber. Fabroni did see some textile
(05:55):
applications for this and prepared some samples of fabrics that
were coated with rubber. He published his findings in France
and Italy in the seventeen nineties, with the most detailed
write ups about it appearing in Italy in seventeen ninety six.
So here it is. This is the first rainwear. No,
actually not. Petroleum distolate was difficult to produce in large quantities.
(06:19):
The next step was scientists figuring out how to actually
make these discoveries viable for more than just these little
one off samples. Yeah, and these were like not as
though he was even making clothes with the samples. It
was like, here is your sample of an eight by
eight inch p here's a fabric, fabric, Yes, it's a swatch.
(06:40):
At that point, other scientists continued to work on how
to make rubber work practically. But before garments, there was
another use for rubber coated fabric, and that was balloons.
But here's the thing, we actually don't know a whole
lot about this use. It does brush up against two
previous episodes, though, and what we have is correspondence between
(07:03):
Faujeu de Saint Fond, one of the people who wrote
about the Mongolfier brothers and their early ballooning efforts, and
another pair of brothers the Robts. That correspondence is kind
of on the bickery side. It seems that each side
of the communication believed that they had had the idea
to try waterproofing balloon fabric first, And there are also
(07:25):
some references years later to something called Blanchard's solution, again
referencing Sophie Blanchard. That would suggest that that was a
rubber and turpentine solution that she used on her balloon,
but there aren't really any specifics about where that solution
came from, if it had been used successfully, etc. Across
(07:46):
the Atlantic Ocean, Spanish scientists working in Mexico were also
working on rubber. At the end of the eighteenth century.
Diaz de la Vega had been one of several men
who had traveled to the Americas to learn more about
a plant known as castilloa elastica after other Europeans had
returned home excited about it. In this case, the effort
(08:09):
was funded by the Spanish colonial government, and de la
Vega was an employee of that government. He created not
clothing but containers. He did that by layering textiles with
natural latex and then shaping the layered result into something
that could hold mercury. We don't really have specifics on
the dimensions or the shape of those containers, but it
(08:31):
seems like the whole project kind of faded off. It
was not really pursued later. I would love to see those.
But then in the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds,
a British surgeon named James Howison, living in Asia did
start applying rubber to clothing to make waterproof gear, and
he wrote about all of this in a paper titled
(08:53):
Some Account of the Elastic Gum Vine of Prince Wales's
Island and of Experiments made on the milky juice which
its with respecting the useful purposes to which it may
be applied. The Prince Wales's Island in the title is
the Malaysian island of Penang, and Howison is credited with
identifying a rubber producing plant called Ursiola elastica, and in
(09:15):
his paper, Howison stated that older vines of that plant
produced the best couch shook and described it as being
similar to a thick cream. He also described making wax
molds of items like gloves and boots and then dipping
them into his rubber solution to make completely rubber items
and using a ruler to spread liquefied rubber onto clothing,
(09:37):
making himself an entire set of waterproof clothes. The next
person in Europe to work on waterproofing with rubber was
really young when he figured some advances out. He was
just eighteen. His name was James Sime and he was
a medical student in Scotland. His story is interesting because
it butts right up against that of Charles Macintosh, who's
(10:01):
credited with inventing the raincoat. An eighteen eighteen, Sime wrote
up his findings that mineral naptha was the best thing
to thin rubber into a usable liquid form, and like
those before him, he worked on waterproofing clothes by spreading
this liquid rubber on them. Other scientists were working with
(10:22):
rubber and writing about the various qualities they observed in it.
During all of this. Dutch physiologist Jan Ingenhaus wrote about
rubber stickiness in seventeen seventy nine, writing quote, this wonderful
substance possesses a strong power of attraction for itself, so
that two pieces cut with a sharp instrument will adhere
strongly together if joined before the cut, and smooth edges
(10:45):
have been touched by the fingers. A French scientist named
Grossar built on that stickiness idea in his work, developing
a method of joining rubber together for his work on
rubber tubing, and building on that was Thomas Hancock, who
developed a device called a masticator in the early eighteen
hundreds that processed rubber to a desired viscosity for use
(11:07):
in a variety of applications, including the types of hoses
that Grossar had developed. Hancock's masticator was a cylinder with
spikes that rotated, and rubber material was passed through one
end and was warmed and cut by the spikes over
and over before being extruded from the other end, as
what was called by one writer quote a united plastic compound.
(11:30):
But unlike his predecessors and their experiments with rubber, Hancock
did not immediately publish all of his findings. He recognized
the possible commercial benefit of keeping the masticator's working secret,
and he ended up working with Charles McIntosh. So we'll
be talking about the man whose name with a different
spelling is still associated with raincoats in just a moment.
(11:54):
Before we get into Charles McIntosh's story, we're going to
pause for a sponsor break. Charles McIntosh that spelled mac
there's no K in his proper name spelling was born
in Glasgow, Scotland, on December twenty ninth, seventeen ninety nine.
(12:17):
Perhaps almost all accounts of his life list that as
his date of birth, but the dissenter in information on
this particular note is a pretty significant one. It's the
National Records of Scotland website which lists his birth date
as November twenty ninth, and there is a photo of
the birth and baptism entry for Charles McIntosh. It is
(12:38):
easy to make out the Nov November on the entry,
as well as the macintosh spelled differently than he spelled
it in his lifetime, and the name Charles, but the
rest of the words are a little bit tricky to
make out. They are in handwritten script, which you know,
anyone's handwriting is tricky, and sometimes that very elegant but
very fancy looking you'll see in old documents is very
(13:01):
hard to discern. The December date, though, is what is given,
for example, in the biography of McIntosh that was written
by his son, so that date is what the immediate
family used Charles's parents were George McIntosh and Mary Moore McIntosh.
George had a factory where die was produced, and his
intention was that his son would one day take over
(13:23):
this business. As a boy, Charles attended grammar school and
was recognized early on for an aptitude in Latin language,
in particular. After grammar school, he attended Caterick Bridge School
in Yorkshire. After studying in England for several years, Charles
went back to Scotland and started working at the counting
(13:43):
house of another merchant in Glasgow that was a mister Glassford.
The goal was this position would further develop Charles's knowledge
of business, and in his biography this read sort of
like an apprenticeship, but sometimes it's characterized more McIntosh just
getting a job as a clerk. Yeah, it seems like
there was a more clear career goal. I read a
(14:06):
few that were like, after being tired of being a clerk,
he became an inventor, and I'm like, that's not really right.
But regardless of how that position began, the Glassfords and
the macintoshes were friendly and eventually both fathers and sons,
so four men total all became business partners and by
this point, McIntosh was already very interested in the latest
(14:29):
advancements in chemistry. He exchanged letters with a lot of
scientists about new discoveries and theories on the matter. He
was also a member of the Commercial Society of Glasgow,
which existed from seventeen eighty seven to eighteen oh three.
This group was formed so that merchants and businessmen in
the area could discuss and debate social and political issues
(14:52):
that impacted the economy. During this time, Charles McIntosh wrote
essays on various happenings of the day, including the late
eighteen teenth century friction between Britain and Ireland. This has
a decidedly pro British slant. He also wrote essays for
the society about European trade, agriculture, the iron trade, and
(15:13):
the manufacture of textiles, specifically wool. In his essay on wool,
he wrote quote this essay commences with expressions of regret
that the woolen manufacture should not have been introduced on
a scale of any extent in Scotland, seeing that the
country is in many respects well calculated for it. And
(15:34):
these essays were written when McIntosh was still very young.
They were all written before he was even twenty one,
and during that time he was also busy working on
starting his own business enterprise. He started a company in
partnership with his father and another investor named William Cooper
to manufacture ammonium chloride, which at the time was called
sal ammoniac. This was not a glamorous enterprise. McIntosh's primary
(15:59):
sources that he used for extraction of ammonium chloride were
soot and urine, and it was difficult to process in
the late seventeen hundreds, but then it could be sold
to metalsmith's and pharmacies. This business only lasted about six years,
but during it Charles was often corresponding with experts in
production to refine his process and to use the resources
(16:21):
he had available through this venture to perform some additional
experiments of his own and expand the company's offerings. Not
long after the company formed, Charles started traveling around Europe
to make sales deals some involved having a lot of
pluck for a man in his early twenties, but to
be clear, he had a lot of help from his
father and his father's business associates, all of whom made
(16:45):
introductions for him and encouraged their various contacts to consider
doing business with him. When Macintosh returned to Scotland, he
brought back some knowledge as well, including of new innovations
in chemistry. According to an early nineteenth century Scotland statistics report,
it was Charles McIntosh who introduced the production of acetate
(17:07):
of lead and acetate of alumina into Britain. McIntosh wrote
about this in a letter to a business associate several
years later in eighteen hundred. Quote, when in Holland, I
was admitted to see a sugar of lead work, and
was struck with the circumstance of both the lead and coal,
and frequently the malt used in making the vinegar, employed
in it being imported into Holland from Britain, and that
(17:30):
the manufactured article, when sent back to US, should become
loaded upon its arrival with a duty of threepence per pound.
On my return to Glasgow, I attempted to make sugar
of lead and was successful in making as salt equal
in quality to the Dutch. I established a manufactory of
it in the year seventeen eighty six, which as you know,
(17:50):
has been going on pretty successfully ever since. So he
had realized that he could circumvent that process of exporting
raw material that was used in making lead and then
importing the acetate and paying an import tax for it.
This would have been something of significant interest to McIntosh
because lead acetate, as it is more commonly known today,
(18:13):
is a die fixative that's used in the textile industry,
so it would have really benefited the family business to
produce it right there in Glasgow instead of dealing with
all these imports and exports. This actually led to Britain's
supplanting the Netherlands as the main exporter in Europe of
lead acetate. McIntosh had not patented his process, though, so
(18:36):
a lot of other manufacturers jumped into production as well.
McIntosh got married to Mary Fisher in seventeen ninety. They
most likely met through one of McIntosh's business contacts. It
seems like all of his life was kind of set
up through his and his father's business contracts because her
father was also a Glasgow merchant. McIntosh was involved in
(18:59):
a lot of businesses in his early years. He made
advancements in dye production, particularly with the color known as
Prussian blue. He also opened Scotland's first alum works. One
of the advertisements that ran for one of his products.
Read quote Charles Macintosh in Company's refined malt vinegar for
(19:19):
the use of families and for pickling, et cetera vinegar
of the most superior quality for the above purposes, warranted
and perfectly pure vegetable acid in which the most delicate
tests can detect no adulteration of any kind, and which
will never spoil from keeping nor deposit any slimy gelatinous substance.
(19:41):
This vinegar will be found equal in strength and flavor
to the strongest French white wine vinegar, over which it
possesses many advantages. I can't imagine a modern ad for
any kind of food products invoking slimy, gelatinous substances. That's
why that cracked me up. So if you read most
(20:03):
versions of the raincoat creation story, they state that in
eighteen twenty three, McIntosh was kind of working on a
sustainability project. He wanted to find uses for the coal
tar naptha that was produced in gas works. So naptha
is an oily liquid that's produced when natural gas condensates
and coal tar used in production distills into the desired
(20:25):
gas and that condensation. This often reads as though it
was kind of a Eureka moment where he goes, oh,
I could use this. But as we've discussed, a lot
of scientists were working to get to a way to
work with rubber, and naptha had already been arrived at
as a really viable option in that quest. McIntosh was
interested in chemistry and would have absolutely had to read
(20:48):
about the work of his predecessors. This was such a
popular topic that it would have been really hard to
avoid reading about it, and several years before he got
to his part in the rubber story, in eighteen nineteen,
Macintosh made an agreement with the Glasgow Gas Works to
buy the waste products that were left after using coal
(21:09):
to make gas. Those products were tar and amonaical liquor.
Some of these waste products were used in the various
dye processes that Macintosh worked on, but he also put
them to use in other textile experiments, including with rubber.
So the actual invention and I feel like we should
hear quote that, since he's kind of acting on many
(21:32):
other ideas that people have had, is described as follows
in an account written by Thomas Hancock. He's the one
that invented that mast cator machine quote. After the separation
of the ammonia in the conversion of tar into pitch
to suit the purposes of consumers, the essential oil termed
naptha is produced, and the thought occurred to him of
(21:52):
its being possible to render this also useful from its
powers as a solvent of couch shuk or India rubber.
By exposure to the action of the volatile oil termed
naptha obtained from the coal tar, he converted this substance
into a waterproof varnish, the thickness and consistency of which
he could vary according to the quantity of naphtha which
(22:14):
he employed in the process. So Macintosh realized or maybe
confirmed for himself, that naptha could break down India rubber
into a dissolved form. India rubber is the naturally occurring
rubber that can be extracted from various tropical plants. Incidentally,
it went from being called kouchook, which was a term
(22:35):
taken from indigenous languages in the Americas, to being called
India rubber when English speaking scientists realized it could be
used to rub out unwanted writing or drawing marks from
a pencil. That India is a reference to the West Indies,
not the Indian subcontinent. Yes, in that way that many
(22:58):
European names for things don't actually make sense of them.
Just thought we would make clear on that. So once
Macintosh had a fluid stable rubber to work with, he
started experimenting with it on fabric and eventually he spread
some onto a piece of wool, and then he did
a thing that other people had not. He layered another
(23:19):
piece of wool on top of that, sort of gluing
them together and creating a waterproof fabric. Once Macintosh had
his fabric tested and a method developed for large scale production,
he went right into manufacture. He received a patent for
his method of waterproofing fabric on June seventeenth, eighteen twenty three.
(23:39):
It was the fourth British patent for an invention that
utilized rubber, and by the following year he was in
full production of Macintosh Fabric. He had added that extra
K into the name as part of his trademark for this.
I was never able to ferret out exactly why, but
I suspect it was to keep this separate from his
(24:00):
other companies that had the Macintosh name attached. We'll talk
about some of the problems with the early raincoats made
from this material. Right after we hear from some of
the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going. So,
(24:24):
this invention of waterproof fabric was a really huge moment
in clothing technology, the first synthetic fabric, so the things
that are so crucial to our rain gear today, for example,
would not be invented for more than a century. People
had wanted waterproof clothing for a long time, and this
was a big stuff forward, but it was not perfect.
(24:45):
There were a lot of issues right out of the gate.
For one, that fabric was hot, blazingly hot. Two layers
of wool plus a rubber layer that did not breathe
in between them meant that garments made with Macintosh's fabric
could really only be worn comfortably in the coldest weather.
But it doesn't only rain when it's cold. Additionally, sometimes
(25:07):
the rubberized adhesive that Macintosh had created would become viscous
in warm weather, and the fabric would become sticky as
it kind of oozed out through the weave. For another,
that combination of wool and rubber had some other longevity issues.
Wool contains oil even after it's been washed, it retains
some of the oils that it naturally has. As a
(25:28):
product that grows out of an animal, an oil can
break down a lot of sticky substances. This is our
hot tip moment. If you're ever having trouble removing a
bandage that's adhered to your skin, just break out a
little lotion or baby oil. It works better than soap
and water, and better than any harsher things you might use.
And that is the action that was in play here.
(25:49):
So in this case, the wool's oil started to break
down the rubber coating that Macintosh had created, so the
garment's waterproof layer became less and less reliable over time.
And then here's the thing. Just sewing the garment together
meant that every stitch made a tiny hole in the
rubber layer. That doesn't sound too bad, but then when
(26:09):
you consider that each seem essentially was a line of
tiny perforations, and that water could soak through all of those,
you can see how it's a problem. Those are all
issues with this garment's functionality, but there was also an
issue of just general wearability. In the early raincoats, they
were very stiff, so moving around in them was pretty cumbersome.
(26:33):
They couldn't really be tailored, so the fit was sort
of like wearing a tent, and while it probably wasn't
a huge concern for most people who were just happy
to have a garment that would keep them mostly dry,
they were not esthetically very great. The only color they
came in was a drab green, and top things off,
(26:54):
they smelled pretty bad, and this was such an issue.
They smelled so bad that they were banned on public
transportation in some cities. You cannot get on the trolley
if you're wearing a raincoat, which I guess means you
have to walk. So A number of the flaws of
these early garments made with macintosh fabric, like the stitching
(27:17):
lines creating a perforation, came about because McIntosh was making
the fabric and then he was selling that fabric to
garment makers, but tailors didn't really know how to work
with it. How could they. No one had ever sewn
rubberized fabrics before, and McIntosh had told them that they
need to glue the seams rather than just stitching, But
(27:38):
garment makers were kind of wary of taking sewing advice
from a chemist who did not know how to sew.
So after a bit of frustration over this problem, McIntosh
just started production on garments in his own factory. This
is a really significant moment in clothing history for a
reason other than waterproofing. Charles McIntosh was one of the
(27:59):
first garment manufacturers to create clothing in mass production. Most
clothing in the eighteen twenties was still bespoke. You didn't
go into a shop and buy ready made dresses or
suits off the rack. The idea of a clothing factory
was not really something that existed. The creation of an
assembly line is usually credited to Ransom Olds or Henry
(28:23):
Ford in the early nineteen hundreds, but McIntosh was eighty
or ninety years ahead of them. With a garment assembly line,
workers would be assigned to a particular part of the
garment and then the pieces would move on to the
next station and another part of the factory. Completely different
from the idea of going to a tailor and having
a garment maid and they do the whole thing, yeah,
(28:45):
or making your own garment at home. Yeah. The ready
availability of the Macintosh raincoat once all of this was
up and running, actually heard its reputation a little for
a while. In a world, where clothes were usually custom
made for the wearer. The idea that a businessman and
a member of his household staff would wear the same
rain gear kind of made it seem less special. But
(29:07):
some of the hallmarks of the early macintosh coats, including
a tartan lining to reference its inventors Scottish heritage, have
persisted and today they're seen as marks of quality. Initially,
the target market for McIntosh's raincoat consisted of sportsmen and
domestic workers like coachman and footman. This sounds pretty specific,
(29:28):
but it covered the basis for a lot of social strata.
While somebody who worked as a member of a household
staff would benefit from having a waterproof coat for performing
duties that took them outside or walking to and from work,
wealthy people would of course want to have one in
case they wanted to go yachting or hunting, and for
(29:49):
the most part this gear was really geared toward men
until women's macintoshes were introduced. McIntosh worked on improvements to
the design of the raincoat on it an ongoing basis
to try to address the various issues and to expand
the company's offerings continuously. His Glasgow factory setup was initially
(30:09):
very labor intensive. The rubber solution had to be hand
brushed onto the wool and then once applied, it was
smoothed out again by hand with a spatula to make
the application even, and this was done to both sides
of the wool fabric, and then those two rubberized pieces
of fabric would pass through a roller that pressed them together,
and that resulting fabric was then tested by hand by
(30:31):
applying water and seeing if any passed through. In eighteen
twenty five he started collaborating with Thomas Hancock, and McIntosh
soon realized that Hancock's masticator could really speed up production
and save money because it made it a lot easier
to dissolve rubber using less solvent. In eighteen thirty a
(30:51):
factory in Manchester was established to make macintosh rain wear,
and Hancock's masticators were part of that production line. There
were other updates to the process in the Manchester factory,
including spreading the waterproofing rubber onto fabric with a mechanized
roller machine that was steam powered. That was eventually replaced
by a mechanism that rolled the fabric over a canister
(31:13):
that contained the waterproofing so that as the fabric passed
over it, the rubber was applied, and then it passed
through another machine that smoothed it out. That partnership with
Hancock also led to a court battle, although it was
not between the two inventors involved in the business deal.
Hancock had continued to keep the workings of his masticator
(31:34):
secret so that it would retain its market value, but
one of his employees blabbed about it, and also blabbed
the process that was being used to make macintoshes. That
led to other manufacturers using McIntosh's process. Specifically, a company
called Everington and Son was a silk dealer which was
(31:54):
headed by a man named Wyn Ellis. Both McIntosh and
Hancock were eager to their patents and their markets, so
they sued, and in February eighteen thirty six, McIntosh versus
Everington and Ellis was tried in the Court of Commons.
As part of the defense's case, it was revealed that
at least two years before McIntosh had gotten the patent
(32:16):
for his fabric rubber fabric sandwiching technique, balloonist Charles Green
had done the same thing with balloon silk, but in
Green's case, he wasn't publishing that technique. It was kept
secret to give him an edge in this rapidly expanding
field of ballooning. That secrecy meant that it had not
been something that McIntosh would have known, and he did
(32:40):
hold a patent, so even if Green had shared this
with the firm of Everington and Son, there was no
legal ownership of the process on their part. One of
the points made by Thomas Hancock during the trial was
the fact that his employee sharing what he knew was
a secret meant that the work he and Charles McIntosh
did to get the other was original in nature. Yeah, like,
(33:04):
if everybody knew about this already, why did my employee
have to secretly blab it. During the lawsuit, the Attorney
General pointed out how very synonymous McIntosh had become at
that point with the manufacture of raincoats and made the
comment quote, this patent has become almost as well known
as Watt and Bolton's patent for making steam engines or
(33:26):
arc rights for making spinning machines. Many witnesses were called
to testify that yes, while there were other people who
had worked on waterproofing fabric with rubber McIntosh had been
the only one to progress those efforts to a point
where a manufactured good was put into production, and that
that was only possible because of the innovation he had
achieved in sandwiching those layers. According to newspaper accounts, as
(33:50):
the judge was beginning his summation of the evidence to
the jury, the jury stopped him and gave the verdict
for the plaintiff after spending just a few minutes conferring
this in the courtroom. McIntosh had to go to the
Court of Chancellory next for an injunction against Everington and Son,
which he did. He also petitioned for an extension of
(34:10):
his patent, which was set to expire on June seventeenth,
eighteen thirty seven, which was just a year later. McIntosh
did not get that extension, so all of that battle
was really just for the benefit of a year of
patent protection. There's an interesting note here about Hancock in
his ongoing secrecy and protection of his patent and Macintosh's.
(34:33):
Although the entire trial was reported in a periodical called
Mechanics Magazine, none of the secret workings of the masticator
or the production of Macintosh's raincoats were revealed, even though
they were discussed at length in testimony, and that is
because Hancock had close contacts at the magazine and he
had been very clear with them that he would really
(34:54):
rather not see any of their production specifics spilled in
print when they were fighting so so hard against the
theft of them to begin with. Just a few years
after the lawsuit, a new technology emerged that totally changed
the raincoat industry. Vulcanized rubber was introduced in eighteen thirty nine.
This was the work of Charles Goodyear. Goodyear wanted to
(35:18):
improve on the qualities of India rubber, which melted in
the heat and then would stiffen up to the point
that it cracked in the cold. According to legend, it
was an accident that Goodyear added sulfur to rubber and
a heating vessel, but the result was vulcanized rubber that
was a lot more resilient to temperature changes than its
predecessor had been. This became the standard for rainwear use.
(35:42):
You can find lots of old pictures of storefronts of
Goodyear raincoat stores. Yes, I will tell a slight story
about that in our behind the scenes uh. Charles McIntosh
did not get a lot of time to marvel at
the advances of vulcanized rubber. He died on Jill eighteen
forty three from influenza. He had made quite a healthy
(36:05):
fortune for himself. In a census taken two years before
his death, his household showed that, in addition to the family,
a butler and six other members of house staff were
living there. Macintosh was buried in the churchyard at Glasgow Cathedral.
Fourteen ushers were on hand for the burial, and forty
carriages carried the grieving parties to the service. Although Macintosh
(36:28):
was the brand name of the coat made by Charles
McIntosh's company, as we mentioned at the top of the episode,
you might have seen a coat or a jacket just
referred to generically as a Macintosh or a mac even
if it wasn't one that was made by the Macintosh company.
Much the same way that trademarked words like Kleenex and
coke have become more generically used for things like tissue
(36:52):
and soda, the macintosh has come to mean almost any
kind of raincoat, and it sometimes even applied to garments
that are waterproof, and that's not something that happened just conversationally.
There are print catalogs from as early as the nineteen
twenties with British retailer herods calling all of their raincoats
(37:13):
Macintoshes with that K in the spelling. Yes, there are
lots of weird arguments. You can also find online about
people debating over whether it should always be capitalized or not,
or if it has just become a noun on its own.
There have, of course been many many advancements in rainwear
since Charles McIntosh's death, and textile technology continues to evolve,
(37:38):
but the first mass produced rainwear was manufactured because of
his work, and you can incidentally still buy a Macintosh
branded raincoat today. Although the company has also evolved over
the years, the raincoats are still made by hand with
old school methods in a factory that's now in Cumbernold, Scotland.
To work at Macintosh as a coatmaker you have to
(38:00):
apprentice for three years, learning their specific techniques for production.
They regularly partner with high end designers now to produce
their rainwear lines because the name is so synonymous with
quality and those early issues with being so affordable that
they were considered perhaps cheap is no longer in play.
A wool Macintosh raincoat today will set you back close
(38:22):
to one thousand euros. They're beautiful. I see why. They're
beautifully tailored, but definitely not something for the everyman anymore.
That is the story of the Macintosh. Anyone who knows
me might be able to guess where I got the
idea for this episode, which I will reveal on Friday.
Oh yay. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
(38:51):
If you'd like to send us a note, our email
addresses History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
subscribe to the show on the ie heart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shoes
Happy Saturday. After this week's episode on Charles Goodyear and
the invention of vulcanized rubber, we're re airing an episode
on the history of something that was dramatically impacted by
that breakthrough, and that's the raincoat. This originally came out
January twenty third, twenty twenty three. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff
(00:23):
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. So, Tracy, I'm sure you have heard
of a jacket being called a Macintosh Uh huh, and
(00:44):
these days lots of jackets are called that. It became
kind of a generic always correctly, it really means a raincoat,
and if you want to get granular, it means a
specific kind and brand of raincoat. And that's because it's
actually named for the man who is usually credited with
inventing the modern raincoat, and that was Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh.
(01:05):
But as with just about any invention, it is not
as though he came up with the idea out of
thin air. Humans have worked on ways to make garments
water resistant almost since they started wearing them. Whale intestines,
woven grass and leaves, animal firs, tightly woven woolf fibers,
and even oiled and waxed fabrics have been used around
(01:26):
the world by various peoples to try to keep the
rain and moisture at bay. But figuring out how to
manufacture clothes with rubber was a really big breakthrough that
took actually kind of centuries. People really wanted to figure
out the rubber puzzle. I really love looking at pictures
of the various kinds of rainwear that different cultures have
(01:50):
developed around the world. Some of them are just so
fascinating to me. In terms of what we're talking about today.
There are accounts that indicate that indigitious peoples in the
Americas used the natural rubber from trees in a lot
of different ways and were applying rubber to their clothing
as a waterproofing tool well before Europeans arrived in the Americas.
(02:16):
Then Europeans, particularly Spanish and Portuguese explorers, adopted this same practice.
It was not something that they brought back home with
them to Europe. Though, rubber did not really become something
that Europeans paid a lot of attention to until the
mid eighteenth century, when French botanist Francois Fresnou de la
(02:37):
Gatorier started writing about it after spending time studying the
plants in French Guiana for a note. Actually wrote about
the possibility of combining rubber with textiles to create waterproof
clothing as early as seventeen forty nine. But though Freno
and other Europeans who had visited the Americas had seen
(02:57):
this application and had even used it themselves, you would think,
of course they would want to bring that back to Europe,
But the problem was transport. Although the scientific community of
Europe was really eager to experiment with cowed schuk as
it was known in Frenot's writing and often for a
long time, it couldn't really be stabilized for transport, and
(03:18):
so reportedly that raw material would coagulate on the voyage
across the Atlantic. For Reneau thought that rubber could be
combined with turpentine as a solvent, but that actually caused
it to break down, and it introduced oxygen into the mix,
and it just further degraded it. So enter a repeat
character from the podcast, that is Jacques de Vocsal of
(03:40):
the pooping robot Duck Automats of fame. He was really
fascinated with rubber, and he's often credited with creating the
first rubber tube, which he used in that duck. He
was one of the more prominent scientists of the seventeen
hundreds who was talking to colleagues about the potential of
using rubber in a variety of applications. That certainly increased
(04:03):
its profile as a subject of interest. He also communicated
the importance of this line of scientific research in the
early seventeen sixties. He did that when talking to aure
Leonard Jean Baptiste Bertin, who at the time was King
Louis the fifteenth of France's finance minister. Yeah, he was like,
we should really put some money behind this research, shouldn't we.
(04:26):
It's very cool. But it took several more years for
the next link in the chain, meaning another scientist, to
propose another solvent that would make rubber into a substance
that could be used for a wide range of practical applications.
That was the work of French chemist Pierre Joseph Macaire.
Despite being very busy in the seventeen sixties, writing the
(04:48):
historically significant Dictionary of Chemistry. He also wanted to crack
the problem of a solvent for rubber, and he proposed
ether as another solvent option, and presented his work to
the Academy Descience in seventeen sixty eight, but ether was
far too expensive to really ever do anything at a
large scale. In seventeen seventy nine, an Italian botanist and
(05:11):
chemist named Giovanni Valentino Mattia Fabroni of Florence picked up
this effort. As a young scientist, Fabroni had traveled to
Paris and London at the behest of Tuscany nobility, and
had collected instruments for a new laboratory. That laboratory evolved
into the Science Museum of Florence. During these trips, Fabroni
(05:33):
of course met other scientists, and it's believed that that's
when he became interested in rubber. It was a few
years after that initial supply run that Fabroni was back
in London, and through experimentation he identified petroleum distillate or naphtha,
as a solvent for rubber. Fabroni did see some textile
(05:55):
applications for this and prepared some samples of fabrics that
were coated with rubber. He published his findings in France
and Italy in the seventeen nineties, with the most detailed
write ups about it appearing in Italy in seventeen ninety six.
So here it is. This is the first rainwear. No,
actually not. Petroleum distolate was difficult to produce in large quantities.
(06:19):
The next step was scientists figuring out how to actually
make these discoveries viable for more than just these little
one off samples. Yeah, and these were like not as
though he was even making clothes with the samples. It
was like, here is your sample of an eight by
eight inch p here's a fabric, fabric, Yes, it's a swatch.
(06:40):
At that point, other scientists continued to work on how
to make rubber work practically. But before garments, there was
another use for rubber coated fabric, and that was balloons.
But here's the thing, we actually don't know a whole
lot about this use. It does brush up against two
previous episodes, though, and what we have is correspondence between
(07:03):
Faujeu de Saint Fond, one of the people who wrote
about the Mongolfier brothers and their early ballooning efforts, and
another pair of brothers the Robts. That correspondence is kind
of on the bickery side. It seems that each side
of the communication believed that they had had the idea
to try waterproofing balloon fabric first, And there are also
(07:25):
some references years later to something called Blanchard's solution, again
referencing Sophie Blanchard. That would suggest that that was a
rubber and turpentine solution that she used on her balloon,
but there aren't really any specifics about where that solution
came from, if it had been used successfully, etc. Across
(07:46):
the Atlantic Ocean, Spanish scientists working in Mexico were also
working on rubber. At the end of the eighteenth century.
Diaz de la Vega had been one of several men
who had traveled to the Americas to learn more about
a plant known as castilloa elastica after other Europeans had
returned home excited about it. In this case, the effort
(08:09):
was funded by the Spanish colonial government, and de la
Vega was an employee of that government. He created not
clothing but containers. He did that by layering textiles with
natural latex and then shaping the layered result into something
that could hold mercury. We don't really have specifics on
the dimensions or the shape of those containers, but it
(08:31):
seems like the whole project kind of faded off. It
was not really pursued later. I would love to see those.
But then in the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds,
a British surgeon named James Howison, living in Asia did
start applying rubber to clothing to make waterproof gear, and
he wrote about all of this in a paper titled
(08:53):
Some Account of the Elastic Gum Vine of Prince Wales's
Island and of Experiments made on the milky juice which
its with respecting the useful purposes to which it may
be applied. The Prince Wales's Island in the title is
the Malaysian island of Penang, and Howison is credited with
identifying a rubber producing plant called Ursiola elastica, and in
(09:15):
his paper, Howison stated that older vines of that plant
produced the best couch shook and described it as being
similar to a thick cream. He also described making wax
molds of items like gloves and boots and then dipping
them into his rubber solution to make completely rubber items
and using a ruler to spread liquefied rubber onto clothing,
(09:37):
making himself an entire set of waterproof clothes. The next
person in Europe to work on waterproofing with rubber was
really young when he figured some advances out. He was
just eighteen. His name was James Sime and he was
a medical student in Scotland. His story is interesting because
it butts right up against that of Charles Macintosh, who's
(10:01):
credited with inventing the raincoat. An eighteen eighteen, Sime wrote
up his findings that mineral naptha was the best thing
to thin rubber into a usable liquid form, and like
those before him, he worked on waterproofing clothes by spreading
this liquid rubber on them. Other scientists were working with
(10:22):
rubber and writing about the various qualities they observed in it.
During all of this. Dutch physiologist Jan Ingenhaus wrote about
rubber stickiness in seventeen seventy nine, writing quote, this wonderful
substance possesses a strong power of attraction for itself, so
that two pieces cut with a sharp instrument will adhere
strongly together if joined before the cut, and smooth edges
(10:45):
have been touched by the fingers. A French scientist named
Grossar built on that stickiness idea in his work, developing
a method of joining rubber together for his work on
rubber tubing, and building on that was Thomas Hancock, who
developed a device called a masticator in the early eighteen
hundreds that processed rubber to a desired viscosity for use
(11:07):
in a variety of applications, including the types of hoses
that Grossar had developed. Hancock's masticator was a cylinder with
spikes that rotated, and rubber material was passed through one
end and was warmed and cut by the spikes over
and over before being extruded from the other end, as
what was called by one writer quote a united plastic compound.
(11:30):
But unlike his predecessors and their experiments with rubber, Hancock
did not immediately publish all of his findings. He recognized
the possible commercial benefit of keeping the masticator's working secret,
and he ended up working with Charles McIntosh. So we'll
be talking about the man whose name with a different
spelling is still associated with raincoats in just a moment.
(11:54):
Before we get into Charles McIntosh's story, we're going to
pause for a sponsor break. Charles McIntosh that spelled mac
there's no K in his proper name spelling was born
in Glasgow, Scotland, on December twenty ninth, seventeen ninety nine.
(12:17):
Perhaps almost all accounts of his life list that as
his date of birth, but the dissenter in information on
this particular note is a pretty significant one. It's the
National Records of Scotland website which lists his birth date
as November twenty ninth, and there is a photo of
the birth and baptism entry for Charles McIntosh. It is
(12:38):
easy to make out the Nov November on the entry,
as well as the macintosh spelled differently than he spelled
it in his lifetime, and the name Charles, but the
rest of the words are a little bit tricky to
make out. They are in handwritten script, which you know,
anyone's handwriting is tricky, and sometimes that very elegant but
very fancy looking you'll see in old documents is very
(13:01):
hard to discern. The December date, though, is what is given,
for example, in the biography of McIntosh that was written
by his son, so that date is what the immediate
family used Charles's parents were George McIntosh and Mary Moore McIntosh.
George had a factory where die was produced, and his
intention was that his son would one day take over
(13:23):
this business. As a boy, Charles attended grammar school and
was recognized early on for an aptitude in Latin language,
in particular. After grammar school, he attended Caterick Bridge School
in Yorkshire. After studying in England for several years, Charles
went back to Scotland and started working at the counting
(13:43):
house of another merchant in Glasgow that was a mister Glassford.
The goal was this position would further develop Charles's knowledge
of business, and in his biography this read sort of
like an apprenticeship, but sometimes it's characterized more McIntosh just
getting a job as a clerk. Yeah, it seems like
there was a more clear career goal. I read a
(14:06):
few that were like, after being tired of being a clerk,
he became an inventor, and I'm like, that's not really right.
But regardless of how that position began, the Glassfords and
the macintoshes were friendly and eventually both fathers and sons,
so four men total all became business partners and by
this point, McIntosh was already very interested in the latest
(14:29):
advancements in chemistry. He exchanged letters with a lot of
scientists about new discoveries and theories on the matter. He
was also a member of the Commercial Society of Glasgow,
which existed from seventeen eighty seven to eighteen oh three.
This group was formed so that merchants and businessmen in
the area could discuss and debate social and political issues
(14:52):
that impacted the economy. During this time, Charles McIntosh wrote
essays on various happenings of the day, including the late
eighteen teenth century friction between Britain and Ireland. This has
a decidedly pro British slant. He also wrote essays for
the society about European trade, agriculture, the iron trade, and
(15:13):
the manufacture of textiles, specifically wool. In his essay on wool,
he wrote quote this essay commences with expressions of regret
that the woolen manufacture should not have been introduced on
a scale of any extent in Scotland, seeing that the
country is in many respects well calculated for it. And
(15:34):
these essays were written when McIntosh was still very young.
They were all written before he was even twenty one,
and during that time he was also busy working on
starting his own business enterprise. He started a company in
partnership with his father and another investor named William Cooper
to manufacture ammonium chloride, which at the time was called
sal ammoniac. This was not a glamorous enterprise. McIntosh's primary
(15:59):
sources that he used for extraction of ammonium chloride were
soot and urine, and it was difficult to process in
the late seventeen hundreds, but then it could be sold
to metalsmith's and pharmacies. This business only lasted about six years,
but during it Charles was often corresponding with experts in
production to refine his process and to use the resources
(16:21):
he had available through this venture to perform some additional
experiments of his own and expand the company's offerings. Not
long after the company formed, Charles started traveling around Europe
to make sales deals some involved having a lot of
pluck for a man in his early twenties, but to
be clear, he had a lot of help from his
father and his father's business associates, all of whom made
(16:45):
introductions for him and encouraged their various contacts to consider
doing business with him. When Macintosh returned to Scotland, he
brought back some knowledge as well, including of new innovations
in chemistry. According to an early nineteenth century Scotland statistics report,
it was Charles McIntosh who introduced the production of acetate
(17:07):
of lead and acetate of alumina into Britain. McIntosh wrote
about this in a letter to a business associate several
years later in eighteen hundred. Quote, when in Holland, I
was admitted to see a sugar of lead work, and
was struck with the circumstance of both the lead and coal,
and frequently the malt used in making the vinegar, employed
in it being imported into Holland from Britain, and that
(17:30):
the manufactured article, when sent back to US, should become
loaded upon its arrival with a duty of threepence per pound.
On my return to Glasgow, I attempted to make sugar
of lead and was successful in making as salt equal
in quality to the Dutch. I established a manufactory of
it in the year seventeen eighty six, which as you know,
(17:50):
has been going on pretty successfully ever since. So he
had realized that he could circumvent that process of exporting
raw material that was used in making lead and then
importing the acetate and paying an import tax for it.
This would have been something of significant interest to McIntosh
because lead acetate, as it is more commonly known today,
(18:13):
is a die fixative that's used in the textile industry,
so it would have really benefited the family business to
produce it right there in Glasgow instead of dealing with
all these imports and exports. This actually led to Britain's
supplanting the Netherlands as the main exporter in Europe of
lead acetate. McIntosh had not patented his process, though, so
(18:36):
a lot of other manufacturers jumped into production as well.
McIntosh got married to Mary Fisher in seventeen ninety. They
most likely met through one of McIntosh's business contacts. It
seems like all of his life was kind of set
up through his and his father's business contracts because her
father was also a Glasgow merchant. McIntosh was involved in
(18:59):
a lot of businesses in his early years. He made
advancements in dye production, particularly with the color known as
Prussian blue. He also opened Scotland's first alum works. One
of the advertisements that ran for one of his products.
Read quote Charles Macintosh in Company's refined malt vinegar for
(19:19):
the use of families and for pickling, et cetera vinegar
of the most superior quality for the above purposes, warranted
and perfectly pure vegetable acid in which the most delicate
tests can detect no adulteration of any kind, and which
will never spoil from keeping nor deposit any slimy gelatinous substance.
(19:41):
This vinegar will be found equal in strength and flavor
to the strongest French white wine vinegar, over which it
possesses many advantages. I can't imagine a modern ad for
any kind of food products invoking slimy, gelatinous substances. That's
why that cracked me up. So if you read most
(20:03):
versions of the raincoat creation story, they state that in
eighteen twenty three, McIntosh was kind of working on a
sustainability project. He wanted to find uses for the coal
tar naptha that was produced in gas works. So naptha
is an oily liquid that's produced when natural gas condensates
and coal tar used in production distills into the desired
(20:25):
gas and that condensation. This often reads as though it
was kind of a Eureka moment where he goes, oh,
I could use this. But as we've discussed, a lot
of scientists were working to get to a way to
work with rubber, and naptha had already been arrived at
as a really viable option in that quest. McIntosh was
interested in chemistry and would have absolutely had to read
(20:48):
about the work of his predecessors. This was such a
popular topic that it would have been really hard to
avoid reading about it, and several years before he got
to his part in the rubber story, in eighteen nineteen,
Macintosh made an agreement with the Glasgow Gas Works to
buy the waste products that were left after using coal
(21:09):
to make gas. Those products were tar and amonaical liquor.
Some of these waste products were used in the various
dye processes that Macintosh worked on, but he also put
them to use in other textile experiments, including with rubber.
So the actual invention and I feel like we should
hear quote that, since he's kind of acting on many
(21:32):
other ideas that people have had, is described as follows
in an account written by Thomas Hancock. He's the one
that invented that mast cator machine quote. After the separation
of the ammonia in the conversion of tar into pitch
to suit the purposes of consumers, the essential oil termed
naptha is produced, and the thought occurred to him of
(21:52):
its being possible to render this also useful from its
powers as a solvent of couch shuk or India rubber.
By exposure to the action of the volatile oil termed
naptha obtained from the coal tar, he converted this substance
into a waterproof varnish, the thickness and consistency of which
he could vary according to the quantity of naphtha which
(22:14):
he employed in the process. So Macintosh realized or maybe
confirmed for himself, that naptha could break down India rubber
into a dissolved form. India rubber is the naturally occurring
rubber that can be extracted from various tropical plants. Incidentally,
it went from being called kouchook, which was a term
(22:35):
taken from indigenous languages in the Americas, to being called
India rubber when English speaking scientists realized it could be
used to rub out unwanted writing or drawing marks from
a pencil. That India is a reference to the West Indies,
not the Indian subcontinent. Yes, in that way that many
(22:58):
European names for things don't actually make sense of them.
Just thought we would make clear on that. So once
Macintosh had a fluid stable rubber to work with, he
started experimenting with it on fabric and eventually he spread
some onto a piece of wool, and then he did
a thing that other people had not. He layered another
(23:19):
piece of wool on top of that, sort of gluing
them together and creating a waterproof fabric. Once Macintosh had
his fabric tested and a method developed for large scale production,
he went right into manufacture. He received a patent for
his method of waterproofing fabric on June seventeenth, eighteen twenty three.
(23:39):
It was the fourth British patent for an invention that
utilized rubber, and by the following year he was in
full production of Macintosh Fabric. He had added that extra
K into the name as part of his trademark for this.
I was never able to ferret out exactly why, but
I suspect it was to keep this separate from his
(24:00):
other companies that had the Macintosh name attached. We'll talk
about some of the problems with the early raincoats made
from this material. Right after we hear from some of
the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going. So,
(24:24):
this invention of waterproof fabric was a really huge moment
in clothing technology, the first synthetic fabric, so the things
that are so crucial to our rain gear today, for example,
would not be invented for more than a century. People
had wanted waterproof clothing for a long time, and this
was a big stuff forward, but it was not perfect.
(24:45):
There were a lot of issues right out of the gate.
For one, that fabric was hot, blazingly hot. Two layers
of wool plus a rubber layer that did not breathe
in between them meant that garments made with Macintosh's fabric
could really only be worn comfortably in the coldest weather.
But it doesn't only rain when it's cold. Additionally, sometimes
(25:07):
the rubberized adhesive that Macintosh had created would become viscous
in warm weather, and the fabric would become sticky as
it kind of oozed out through the weave. For another,
that combination of wool and rubber had some other longevity issues.
Wool contains oil even after it's been washed, it retains
some of the oils that it naturally has. As a
(25:28):
product that grows out of an animal, an oil can
break down a lot of sticky substances. This is our
hot tip moment. If you're ever having trouble removing a
bandage that's adhered to your skin, just break out a
little lotion or baby oil. It works better than soap
and water, and better than any harsher things you might use.
And that is the action that was in play here.
(25:49):
So in this case, the wool's oil started to break
down the rubber coating that Macintosh had created, so the
garment's waterproof layer became less and less reliable over time.
And then here's the thing. Just sewing the garment together
meant that every stitch made a tiny hole in the
rubber layer. That doesn't sound too bad, but then when
(26:09):
you consider that each seem essentially was a line of
tiny perforations, and that water could soak through all of those,
you can see how it's a problem. Those are all
issues with this garment's functionality, but there was also an
issue of just general wearability. In the early raincoats, they
were very stiff, so moving around in them was pretty cumbersome.
(26:33):
They couldn't really be tailored, so the fit was sort
of like wearing a tent, and while it probably wasn't
a huge concern for most people who were just happy
to have a garment that would keep them mostly dry,
they were not esthetically very great. The only color they
came in was a drab green, and top things off,
(26:54):
they smelled pretty bad, and this was such an issue.
They smelled so bad that they were banned on public
transportation in some cities. You cannot get on the trolley
if you're wearing a raincoat, which I guess means you
have to walk. So A number of the flaws of
these early garments made with macintosh fabric, like the stitching
(27:17):
lines creating a perforation, came about because McIntosh was making
the fabric and then he was selling that fabric to
garment makers, but tailors didn't really know how to work
with it. How could they. No one had ever sewn
rubberized fabrics before, and McIntosh had told them that they
need to glue the seams rather than just stitching, But
(27:38):
garment makers were kind of wary of taking sewing advice
from a chemist who did not know how to sew.
So after a bit of frustration over this problem, McIntosh
just started production on garments in his own factory. This
is a really significant moment in clothing history for a
reason other than waterproofing. Charles McIntosh was one of the
(27:59):
first garment manufacturers to create clothing in mass production. Most
clothing in the eighteen twenties was still bespoke. You didn't
go into a shop and buy ready made dresses or
suits off the rack. The idea of a clothing factory
was not really something that existed. The creation of an
assembly line is usually credited to Ransom Olds or Henry
(28:23):
Ford in the early nineteen hundreds, but McIntosh was eighty
or ninety years ahead of them. With a garment assembly line,
workers would be assigned to a particular part of the
garment and then the pieces would move on to the
next station and another part of the factory. Completely different
from the idea of going to a tailor and having
a garment maid and they do the whole thing, yeah,
(28:45):
or making your own garment at home. Yeah. The ready
availability of the Macintosh raincoat once all of this was
up and running, actually heard its reputation a little for
a while. In a world, where clothes were usually custom
made for the wearer. The idea that a businessman and
a member of his household staff would wear the same
rain gear kind of made it seem less special. But
(29:07):
some of the hallmarks of the early macintosh coats, including
a tartan lining to reference its inventors Scottish heritage, have
persisted and today they're seen as marks of quality. Initially,
the target market for McIntosh's raincoat consisted of sportsmen and
domestic workers like coachman and footman. This sounds pretty specific,
(29:28):
but it covered the basis for a lot of social strata.
While somebody who worked as a member of a household
staff would benefit from having a waterproof coat for performing
duties that took them outside or walking to and from work,
wealthy people would of course want to have one in
case they wanted to go yachting or hunting, and for
(29:49):
the most part this gear was really geared toward men
until women's macintoshes were introduced. McIntosh worked on improvements to
the design of the raincoat on it an ongoing basis
to try to address the various issues and to expand
the company's offerings continuously. His Glasgow factory setup was initially
(30:09):
very labor intensive. The rubber solution had to be hand
brushed onto the wool and then once applied, it was
smoothed out again by hand with a spatula to make
the application even, and this was done to both sides
of the wool fabric, and then those two rubberized pieces
of fabric would pass through a roller that pressed them together,
and that resulting fabric was then tested by hand by
(30:31):
applying water and seeing if any passed through. In eighteen
twenty five he started collaborating with Thomas Hancock, and McIntosh
soon realized that Hancock's masticator could really speed up production
and save money because it made it a lot easier
to dissolve rubber using less solvent. In eighteen thirty a
(30:51):
factory in Manchester was established to make macintosh rain wear,
and Hancock's masticators were part of that production line. There
were other updates to the process in the Manchester factory,
including spreading the waterproofing rubber onto fabric with a mechanized
roller machine that was steam powered. That was eventually replaced
by a mechanism that rolled the fabric over a canister
(31:13):
that contained the waterproofing so that as the fabric passed
over it, the rubber was applied, and then it passed
through another machine that smoothed it out. That partnership with
Hancock also led to a court battle, although it was
not between the two inventors involved in the business deal.
Hancock had continued to keep the workings of his masticator
(31:34):
secret so that it would retain its market value, but
one of his employees blabbed about it, and also blabbed
the process that was being used to make macintoshes. That
led to other manufacturers using McIntosh's process. Specifically, a company
called Everington and Son was a silk dealer which was
(31:54):
headed by a man named Wyn Ellis. Both McIntosh and
Hancock were eager to their patents and their markets, so
they sued, and in February eighteen thirty six, McIntosh versus
Everington and Ellis was tried in the Court of Commons.
As part of the defense's case, it was revealed that
at least two years before McIntosh had gotten the patent
(32:16):
for his fabric rubber fabric sandwiching technique, balloonist Charles Green
had done the same thing with balloon silk, but in
Green's case, he wasn't publishing that technique. It was kept
secret to give him an edge in this rapidly expanding
field of ballooning. That secrecy meant that it had not
been something that McIntosh would have known, and he did
(32:40):
hold a patent, so even if Green had shared this
with the firm of Everington and Son, there was no
legal ownership of the process on their part. One of
the points made by Thomas Hancock during the trial was
the fact that his employee sharing what he knew was
a secret meant that the work he and Charles McIntosh
did to get the other was original in nature. Yeah, like,
(33:04):
if everybody knew about this already, why did my employee
have to secretly blab it. During the lawsuit, the Attorney
General pointed out how very synonymous McIntosh had become at
that point with the manufacture of raincoats and made the
comment quote, this patent has become almost as well known
as Watt and Bolton's patent for making steam engines or
(33:26):
arc rights for making spinning machines. Many witnesses were called
to testify that yes, while there were other people who
had worked on waterproofing fabric with rubber McIntosh had been
the only one to progress those efforts to a point
where a manufactured good was put into production, and that
that was only possible because of the innovation he had
achieved in sandwiching those layers. According to newspaper accounts, as
(33:50):
the judge was beginning his summation of the evidence to
the jury, the jury stopped him and gave the verdict
for the plaintiff after spending just a few minutes conferring
this in the courtroom. McIntosh had to go to the
Court of Chancellory next for an injunction against Everington and Son,
which he did. He also petitioned for an extension of
(34:10):
his patent, which was set to expire on June seventeenth,
eighteen thirty seven, which was just a year later. McIntosh
did not get that extension, so all of that battle
was really just for the benefit of a year of
patent protection. There's an interesting note here about Hancock in
his ongoing secrecy and protection of his patent and Macintosh's.
(34:33):
Although the entire trial was reported in a periodical called
Mechanics Magazine, none of the secret workings of the masticator
or the production of Macintosh's raincoats were revealed, even though
they were discussed at length in testimony, and that is
because Hancock had close contacts at the magazine and he
had been very clear with them that he would really
(34:54):
rather not see any of their production specifics spilled in
print when they were fighting so so hard against the
theft of them to begin with. Just a few years
after the lawsuit, a new technology emerged that totally changed
the raincoat industry. Vulcanized rubber was introduced in eighteen thirty nine.
This was the work of Charles Goodyear. Goodyear wanted to
(35:18):
improve on the qualities of India rubber, which melted in
the heat and then would stiffen up to the point
that it cracked in the cold. According to legend, it
was an accident that Goodyear added sulfur to rubber and
a heating vessel, but the result was vulcanized rubber that
was a lot more resilient to temperature changes than its
predecessor had been. This became the standard for rainwear use.
(35:42):
You can find lots of old pictures of storefronts of
Goodyear raincoat stores. Yes, I will tell a slight story
about that in our behind the scenes uh. Charles McIntosh
did not get a lot of time to marvel at
the advances of vulcanized rubber. He died on Jill eighteen
forty three from influenza. He had made quite a healthy
(36:05):
fortune for himself. In a census taken two years before
his death, his household showed that, in addition to the family,
a butler and six other members of house staff were
living there. Macintosh was buried in the churchyard at Glasgow Cathedral.
Fourteen ushers were on hand for the burial, and forty
carriages carried the grieving parties to the service. Although Macintosh
(36:28):
was the brand name of the coat made by Charles
McIntosh's company, as we mentioned at the top of the episode,
you might have seen a coat or a jacket just
referred to generically as a Macintosh or a mac even
if it wasn't one that was made by the Macintosh company.
Much the same way that trademarked words like Kleenex and
coke have become more generically used for things like tissue
(36:52):
and soda, the macintosh has come to mean almost any
kind of raincoat, and it sometimes even applied to garments
that are waterproof, and that's not something that happened just conversationally.
There are print catalogs from as early as the nineteen
twenties with British retailer herods calling all of their raincoats
(37:13):
Macintoshes with that K in the spelling. Yes, there are
lots of weird arguments. You can also find online about
people debating over whether it should always be capitalized or not,
or if it has just become a noun on its own.
There have, of course been many many advancements in rainwear
since Charles McIntosh's death, and textile technology continues to evolve,
(37:38):
but the first mass produced rainwear was manufactured because of
his work, and you can incidentally still buy a Macintosh
branded raincoat today. Although the company has also evolved over
the years, the raincoats are still made by hand with
old school methods in a factory that's now in Cumbernold, Scotland.
To work at Macintosh as a coatmaker you have to
(38:00):
apprentice for three years, learning their specific techniques for production.
They regularly partner with high end designers now to produce
their rainwear lines because the name is so synonymous with
quality and those early issues with being so affordable that
they were considered perhaps cheap is no longer in play.
A wool Macintosh raincoat today will set you back close
(38:22):
to one thousand euros. They're beautiful. I see why. They're
beautifully tailored, but definitely not something for the everyman anymore.
That is the story of the Macintosh. Anyone who knows
me might be able to guess where I got the
idea for this episode, which I will reveal on Friday.
Oh yay. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
(38:51):
If you'd like to send us a note, our email
addresses History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
subscribe to the show on the ie heart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shoes
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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