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The history of the raincoat |
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The history of rainwear takes us to the heart of the industrial revolution. Cotton of course was King - but rubber came to be what one may call a significant consort. At cotton's side rubber offered the world a huge range of manufactures which were either complete innovations, or dramatic improvements on what had gone before. Waterproof clothing was effectively one of the great innovations.
When the industrial world began to ask how the potential of 'rubber' might be exploited, compounding it with fabric was a early idea, and the use of 'rubber' in the industrial world took the form first of all of waterproofing cloth. Rubberising made the cloth waterproof - and it rendered the cloth impervious to gas as well.
'Rubber' was imported by the industrial world in the early 19th Century mostly in the form of pieces of spongy material "uncouth in form, and irregular in surface and size" (Hancock, Narrative, p.8.).
I put 'rubber' in quotation marks because there are distinctions to be made! The substance that oozes from Hevea brasiliensis (and a range of other plants) is known as latex. Before anything else is done, once a quantity of latex has been collected, a coagulant is added, which causes a spongy solid mass to separate out from a liquid 'serum', which is generally throw away. We call the spongy coagulant today raw rubber. But in Hancock's day it was called Caoutchouc, or India -rubber (Hancock, Narrative, p.1, his spelling, capitals and hyphen).
(Another term to be found in the old literature is Gutta percha (sometimes written as gutta percha, sometimes gutta-percha, sometimes Gutta-percha). This is a substance closely akin to India-rubber chemically and in derivation, obtained from different species of plants from the same genus. Goodyear provides details in his Gum-Elastic, p.28ff)
The scale of importation into the UK in the early 19th Century was very small - the only application, at least by his own report when first encountered by Hancock himself (Narrative, p.2) being the use of tiny pieces of the material to erase pencil marks (the modern technique for making the pencil was invented in 1795). Later there was some importation of 'rubber' in the form of small bottles (Narrative, p.5).
The situation in the first two decades of the 19th Century was that the unique properties of 'caoutchouc' were had been noted in Europe and excited interest and experimentation. The problem was to find a way of manipulating the material as it presented itself so that these extraordinary properties could be exploited in saleable products.
One route was to try and identify a solvent. Herrissent and Macquer in France were early experimenters with turpentine and ether and the earliest application of rubber to the development of surgical instruments resulted. (Woodruff, p.2)
The other route was to develop 'mastication'. By 'kneading' and/or tearing raw rubber pieces it was found possible to create a single more homogeneous mass of rubber which could be forced into moulds or sheets. Hancock's machine for this purpose was called a 'pickle'. In the US a huge mangle affair was devised by Chaufee, with cylinders of unequal diameter so that raw pieces of rubber passing between them were subjected to tearing forces which resulted in the formation of single more homogeneous sheets. A patent adumbrating the idea was obtained in the US in 1820 - before the Macintosh watershed - although the first implementation came afterwards, by the first US india-rubber Company at Roxbury, Massachusetts, launched in 1833. The 1820 patent however was preceded by small-scale experimentation over a number of years. (I am relying throughout this paragraph on Woodruff, Chapter 1.)
In the UK a decisive development along the solvent approach occurred in 1823, when Charles Macintosh obtained a patent for his 'double-textures'.
In the US a number of firms sprang up intent upon exploiting the promise of mastication to open the way to the manufacture of a wide range of extremely desirable rubber-based products: only to collapse when these promises went unfulfilled. Techniques for making rubber products prior to the invention of vulcanisation produced goods which disintegrated soon after being put to use.
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