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The history of the raincoat |
Club Foyer>Chillout Room >Rainwear History
The first development in rubber technology of large commercial significance involved the spreading of rubber onto cloth.
There were two approaches: pressing the rubber into the cloth, and 'painting' the cloth with a solution of rubber and allowing the solvent to evaporate. The first method was employed by and large in the United States, the second in the UK.
A first step in the second process was to render the raw rubber, which was available in the form of blocks of various sizes, 'masticated'. That is, it had to be rendered so that the blocks could be melded together into larger lots, lots of such a consistency as permitted them to be pulled out into sheets. Only in that form could it be pressed into fabric. This was achieved with a sort of large 'mangle', the raw rubber being squeezed between two rollers. One of the rollers was larger than the other to produce the kind of 'tearing' effect which effected the mastication. Having the rollers steam-heated promoted the process.
The idea of steam-heated twin rollers, of unequal diameter to 'kneed' the raw rubber and squeeze it into a thin sheets, was patented in the States in 1836 by Edwin Marcus Chaffee. Chaffee was part of the partnership which built plant on the principle of his patent, forming the Roxbury nn which launched in 1833. Following mastication, the rubber, now in sheet form, was passed through another pair of rollers (Woodruff p. 7 says these were of unequal diameter, but he must be himself somewhat masticated on this point - rollers of unequal size would be disastrous when it came to pressing the rubber into the cloth). Cloth and post-mastication rubber sheet passed between the rollers of this second mangle, under considerable pressure, and a cloth impregnated with rubber emerged. (Woodruff, p7.)
(Thomas Hancock had developed a different mastication technique, involving a machine he called a 'pickle'. (Narrative, p.16) This machine began to produce usable blocks of 'plasticised' rubber from about 1821. He found he could cut slivers of inform thickness off these blocks, and use these sheets to prepared waterproof stoppers for example. But I can find no record of his pressing such sheets into cloth as was done in the early US industry.
What he did do was to mix the raw rubber inside the pickle with various solvents (eg coal naphtha) and produce a material that lent itself to being forced into cloth. For this process he used a large mangle - with two warmed rollers of the same dimensions - passing between the rollers cloth covered with the material produced by the pickle. He obtained by these means 'a smooth sheet of equal substance throughout, and of any required thickness'. Narrative, p.21.
These sheets however were not, for anything Hancock tells us, used for making waterproof garments: they were instead 'applied extensively to the sheathing of ships' bottoms...as a protection against the destructive ravanges of worms' (Narrative, p.21).
Hancock's patent covering these additives and techniques was taken out in 1923 (Narrative, p.20)
The use of rubber-treated cloth to produce really practical garments was begun in the UK when Charles Macintosh had the brilliant idea of neutralising the stickiness of a piece of rubber-coated cloth, and minimising its odour, by joining two such pieces rubber-to-rubber. Macintosh's patent covering his 'double-textures' was granted in 1823.
Macintosh started making his 'double-textured' cloth, and coats made out of them, in Glasgow in nnn but within months had negotiated a collaboration with cotton mill owners in Manchester. A new mill was built for the purpose. The early years were not trouble-free on account of the imperfections of rubberised cloth pre-vulcanisation, ameliorated, not eliminated, by Macintosh's patented technique. Thomas Hancock entered into an agreement of close cooperation with the Manchester partnership in 1826 , retaining as an independent operation his London manufactory, sited since 1821 (Hancock's Narrative, p.14) in Goswell Street. The cooperation between the Macintosh firm and Hancock was taken further in a second agreement in 1830 (Narrative, p.72).
The Macintosh nexus was by far the largest rubber concern in the UK during this pre-Vulcanisation period.
Woodruff says a rubber factory was founded by J. N. Reithofer in Vienna in 1821, and that this was probably the oldest in Europe. (He cites Johann Sloker, Geschichte der osterreichischen Industrie und ihrer Forderung unleT Kaiser Franz I (Vienna, 1914), p 629 et seq. In Germany the factory founded by Francois Fonrobert near Berlin in 1829 was as far as is known the earliest.
In France, it appears the earliest was founded by Rattier and Guibal at Saint-Denis near Paris, in 1928.
As regards Russia, Woodruff comments:
'The development of the industry in Eastern Europe and Russia was also assisted by American skilled artisans and managers, especially the RussianAmerican India Rubber Manufacturing Co., established at St. Petersburg in 1830.' (Woodruff, p.210)
The first rubber manufacturer in the US was at Roxburgh in Massachusetts formed in 1833. (Goodyear says that 'the manufacture of gum-elastic' was begun in the US 'about the year 1831 or 1832.' (Gum-Elastic, p.99))
Before that there had been experimentation and production of rubber articles on a very small scale (Gum-Elastic, p. 132). One such early experimenter was Nathaniel Hayward, who had come into possession of the Eagle factory in Woburn, Massechussetts - when vacated by Eagle (Which Goodyear implies had been involved in rubber manufacture - p.113.). Having met (Nathaniel) Hayward in 1838, Goodyear (by some means - it's not clear in Goodyear's account exactly how this happened) took over the factory and started production of 'life-preservers and other articles' in rubber, Hayward being taken on as an employee. The treatments used in this production are given by Goodyear as 'solarization' and 'the acid gas process', details of which he provides. (Gum-Elastic, p.113) He represents these as improving the performance of raw rubber, but he is much interested in experiments that Hayward had been conducting involving the treatment of raw rubber with sulphur. On his own account (Gum-Elastic, p.113) Goodyear persuaded Hayward to patent one of his results, in which flowers of sulphur were mixed with rubber in its raw state (ie without being dissolved) resulting in articles that had an improved resistence to the otherwise decomposing effect of sunlight (US patent No. 1090 - Woodruff, p.8,9). (Gum-Elastic, p.113) Having persuaded Hayward to patent this result, Goodyear bought the patent from him. The significant outcome was however not successful exploitation of the idea but the stimulus it gave to Goodyear to persist with the experimentation with sulphur, which yielded eventually (within the period 1838-9) the key realization that when the right degree of heat was applied to a rubber- sulphur mix the sought-for transformation in the more unhelpful properties of raw rubber was obtained. This was the discovery by Goodyear of 'vulcanisation'.
