The Invention of the Raincoat

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, Tracy,
I'm sure you have heard of a jacket being called
a Macintosh, and these days lots of jackets are called

(00:24):
that 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. But as with just about any invention,

(00:45):
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 first, tightly woven
woolf fibers, and even oiled and waxed fabrics have been
used around the world by various people to try to

(01:06):
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

(01:28):
have developed around the world. Some of them are just
so fascinating to me. Uh. In terms of what we're
talking about today, there are accounts that indicate that indigenous
peoples in the America's used the natural rubber from trees
in a lot of different ways, and we're applying rubber
to their clothing as a waterproofing tool well before Europeans

(01:52):
arrived in the Americas. 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

(02:13):
friends with fred No Deda Gattoier 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 for No and other Europeans who

(02:34):
had visited the Americas had seen 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 cow shook as it was
known in for No's writing and often for a long time,
it couldn't really be stabilized for transport, and so reportedly

(02:58):
that raw material would coagulate eight on the voyage across
the Atlantic. For No 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 Valcantin of

(03:19):
the pooping robot duck Automata 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 its

(03:42):
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 Are Leonard
Jean Baptiste Berta, who at the time was King Louis
the fifteenth of France's finance minister. Are. Yeah, he was like,
we should really put some money behind this research, shouldn't we.

(04:04):
It's very cool, um. 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

(04:26):
writing the 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 Deciance 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

(04:49):
botanist and 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,

(05:11):
Fabbroni 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 naptha as a solvent for rubber. Fabroni did see

(05:32):
some textile 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 rain waar no actually not petroleum distill It was

(05:55):
difficult to produce in large quantities. 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 a an eight by eight inch, Yes,

(06:18):
it's a swatch. 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

(06:40):
correspondence between Faujeue de Saint Fonde, one of the people
who wrote about the Mongolfier brothers and their early ballooning efforts,
and another pair of brothers, the Robets. 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

(07:03):
also some references years later to something called Blanchard's solution,
again referencing Sophie Blanchard. Uh 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, etcetera.

(07:24):
Across 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 America's to learn more about
the plant known as Castilloa elastica, after other Europeans had
returned home excited about it. In this case, the effort

(07:47):
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

(08:09):
seems like the whole project kind of faded off. It
was not really pursued later. I would love to see
those um But then in the late seventeen hundreds, in
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

(08:30):
a paper titled Some account of the Elastic Gum Vine
of Prince Wales Island, and of Experiments made on the
milky juice which it produces, with respecting the useful purposes
to which it may be applied the Prince Wales Island
and the title is the Malaysian island of Penang. And
Howison is credited with identifying a rubber producing plant called

(08:52):
Ursiola elastica, and in his paper, Howison stated that older
vines of that plant produced the best couch shook and
describe 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

(09:14):
liquefied rubber onto clothing, 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

(09:37):
of Charles McIntosh, he was credited with inventing the raincoat.
In 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.

(09:59):
Other scientists we're working with rubber and writing about the
various qualities they observed in it during all of this.
Dutch physiologist Jahn Ingenhouse 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

(10:21):
before the cut and smooth edges 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

(10:43):
to a desired viscosity for use 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

(11:04):
writer quote a united plastic compound. But unlike his predecessors
and their experiments with rubber, Hancock did not immediately published
all of his findings. He recognized the possible commercial benefit
of keeping the mast carters working secret, and he ended
up working with Charles McIntosh. So we'll be talking about

(11:26):
the man whose name, with a different spelling is still
associated with raincoats. In just a moment, before we get
into Charles McIntosh's story, we're going to pause for a
sponsor break. Charles McIntosh, that's spelled M A C. There's

(11:48):
no K in his proper name spelling. Was born in Glasgow, Scotland,
on December Perhaps almost all accounts of his life list
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

(12:09):
date as November twenty nine, and there is a photo
of the birth and baptism entry for Charles Macintosh. It
is easy to make out the n O V. November
on the entry, as well as the Macintosh spelled differently
than he spelled it in his lifetime uh, and the
name Charles, but the rest of the words are a
little bit tricky to make out there in handwritten script,

(12:30):
which you know anyone's handwriting is tricky, and sometimes that
very elegant but very fancy looking UH script that you'll
see an old documents is very hard to discern. The
December date, though, is what is given, for example, in
the biography of Macintosh that was written by his son,
so that date is what the immediate family used. Charles's

(12:51):
parents were George McIntosh and Mary Moore McIntosh. George had
a factory where d was produced, and his intention was
that his son would one day take over 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 Catterick Bridge School in Yorkshire.

(13:16):
After studying in England for several years. Charles went back
to Scotland and started working at the counting house of
another merchant in Glasgow that was a Mr. Glass Bird,
and the goal was this position would further develop Charles's
knowledge of business, and in his biography this reads sort
of like an apprenticeship, but sometimes it's characterized more as

(13:38):
McIntosh just getting a job as a clerk. Yeah, it
seems like there was a more clear career goal. I
read a 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 glass Words and the macintosh Is were friendly and
eventually both fathers and sons o foreman total all became

(14:02):
business partners. And by this point McIntosh was already very
interested in the latest 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 seven to eighteen
o three. This group was formed so that merchants and

(14:26):
businessmen in the area could discuss and debate social and
political issues that impacted the economy. During this time, Charles
McIntosh wrote essays on various happenings of the day, including
the late eighteenth century friction between Britain and Ireland. This
has a decidedly pro British slant. He also wrote essays

(14:47):
for the Society about European trade, agriculture, the iron trade,
and the manufacturer of textiles, specifically wool. In his essay
on wool, he wrote quote, this essay commences with expres
sctions of regret that the woolen manufacturer should not have
been introduced on a scale of any extent in Scotland,
seeing that the country is in many respects well calculated

(15:11):
for it. And 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.

(15:36):
McIntosh's primary 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 metal smith'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

(15:58):
to use the resources 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 involves having
a lot of pluck for a man in his early twenties,
but to be clear, he had a lot of help

(16:19):
from his father and his father's business associates, all of
whom made introductions for him and encouraged their various contacts
to consider doing business with him. When McIntosh returned to Scotland,
he brought back some knowledge as well, including of new
innovations in chemistry. According to an early nineteenth century Scotland

(16:40):
statistics report, it was Charles McIntosh who introduced the production
of ascetate of lead and ascetate 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 ants of both the

(17:00):
lead and coal, and frequently the malt used in making
the vinegar employed in it being imported into Holland from Britain,
and that 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

(17:21):
as salt equal in quality to the Dutch. I established
a manufactory of it in the year seventy six, which
as you know, 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 ascetate and paying an import tax

(17:43):
for it. This would have been something of significant interest
to Macintosh because lead acetate, as it is more commonly
known today, 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

(18:05):
to Britain's supplanting the Netherlands as the main exporter in
Europe of lead acetate. McIntosh had not patented his process though,
so a lot of other manufacturers jumped into production as well.
McIntosh got married to Mary Fisher in se They most
likely met through one of McIntosh's business contacts. It seems

(18:27):
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 a
lot of businesses in his early years. He made advancements
in die production, particularly with the color known as Prussian Blue.
He also opened Scotland's first album works. One of the

(18:50):
advertisements that ran for one of his products read quote
Charles McIntosh and Companies refined malt vinegar for the use
of families and for pickling at cetera. Vinegar of the
most superior quality for the above purposes. Larranted and perfectly
pure vegetable acid in which the most delicate tests can
detect no adulteration of any kind, and which will never

(19:13):
spoil from keeping nor deposit any slimy gelatinous substance. 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

(19:37):
that cracked me up. So if you read most versions
of the raincoat creation story, they state that in McIntosh
was kind of working on a sustainability project. He wanted
to find uses for the cold tar naptha that was
produced in gas works. So naptha is an oily liquid

(19:57):
that's produced when natural gas condons eights and coal tar
used in production distills into the desired 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

(20:19):
option in that quest. McIntosh was interested in chemistry and
would have absolutely had to read 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, McIntosh made an agreement

(20:42):
with the Glasgow Gas Works to buy the waste products
that were left after using coal to make gas. Those
products where tar and ammonaica liquor. Some of these waste
products were used in the various die processes that McIntosh
worked on, but he also put them to use in
other textile experiments, including with rubber. So the actual invention

(21:06):
and I feel like we should air quote that, since
he's kind of acting on many 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

(21:29):
the thought occurred to him of its being possible to
render this also useful from its powers as a solvent
of couch shook 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 water proof varnish,
the thickness and consistency of which he could vary according

(21:50):
to the quantity of naptha which he employed in the process.
So McIntosh 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 kawchuk,

(22:13):
which was a term taken from indigenous languages in the
America's 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. The India is a
reference to the West Indies, not the Indian subcontinent. Yes,

(22:35):
in that way that many European names for things don't
actually make sense of them. Uh, just though 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

(22:55):
people had not. He layered another piece of wool on
top of that sort of gluing them together and creating
a waterproof fabric. Once McIntosh 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 seventy three. It was the fourth

(23:19):
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 other companies that had

(23:40):
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, this invention of

(24:03):
waterproof fabric was a really huge moment in clothing technology.
The first synthetic fabrics, 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 step forward, but it was not perfect. There were

(24:23):
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 McIntosh is fabric could
really only be worn comfortably in the coldest weather. But
it doesn't only rain when it's called. Additionally, sometimes the

(24:45):
rubber eyed adhesive that McIntosh 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

(25:06):
product that grows out of an animal, and oil can
break down a lot of sticky substances. This is our
hot tip moment. UH. 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. So in this case, the woolves oil started

(25:30):
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 sowing the
garment together meant that every stitch made a tiny hole
in the rubber layer. That doesn't sound too bad, but
then when you consider that each seam essentially was a

(25:51):
line of tiny perforations, and that water could soak through
all of those, you can see how it's a problem.
Those are all issue 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. They couldn't really be tailored, so

(26:14):
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, they smelled pretty bad, and this

(26:35):
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 lines creating a perforation, came about because

(26:58):
McIntosh was making fabric, and then he was selling that
fabric to garment makers. But Taylor's 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 garment makers were kind of wary of taking sewing

(27:19):
advice from a chemist who did not know how to sew. Uh.
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
first garment manufacturers to create clothing in mass production. Most

(27:43):
clothing in the eighteen twenties was still bespoke. You didn't
go into a shop and buy ready made dresses, their
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
Ford in the early nineteen hundreds, but McIntosh was eighty

(28:05):
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 made and they do the whole thing, yeah,
or making your own garment at home. Yeah. The ready

(28:27):
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
some of the hallmarks of the early Macintosh coats, including

(28:48):
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 rain consisted of sportsmen and
domestic workers like coachman and footman. This sounds pretty specific,
but it covered the basis for a lot of social strata.

(29:10):
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
the most part this gear was really geared towards men

(29:30):
until women's Macintoshes were introduced. Macintosh worked on improvements to
the design of the raincoat on an ongoing basis to
try to address the various issues and to expand the
company's offerings continuously. His Glasgow factory setup was initially very
labor intensive. The rubber solution had to be hand brushed

(29:51):
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 rubber eyed pieces
of fabric would pass through a roller that pressed them
together and that resulting fabric was then tested by hand
by applying water and seeing if any passed through. In

(30:12):
eight 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 factory
in Manchester was established to make McIntosh rain wear, and

(30:33):
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 that
contained the waterproofing, so that as the fabric passed over it,

(30:55):
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 mast cat secret
so that it would retain its market value, but one
of his employees blabbed about it, and also blabbed the

(31:19):
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 headed
by a man named Win Ellis. Both McIntosh and Hancock
were eager to protect their patents and their markets, so

(31:40):
they sued, and in February six Macintosh 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 for his
fabric rubber fabric sandwiching technique, balloonist char Alls Green had

(32:00):
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 hold a patent,
so even if Green had shared this with the firm

(32:22):
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 together was
original in nature. Yeah, like, if everybody knew about this already,

(32:44):
why did my employee have to secretly blabb it? During
the lawsuit, the Attorney General pointed out how very synonymous
McIntosh had become at that point with the manufacturer 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 arc rights for making spinning machines.

(33:07):
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,

(33:28):
as 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 there in the courtroom. McIntosh had to go to
the court of Chancellery next for an injunction against Everington
and Son, which he did. He also petitioned for an
extension of his patent, which was set to expire on

(33:51):
June sev eighteen thirty seven, which was just a year later.
McIntosh did not get that extension, so all of that
battle was rely just for the benefit of a year
of patent protection. There's an interesting note here about Hancock
and his ongoing secrecy and protection of his patent and
Macintosh is although the entire trial was reported in a

(34:14):
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 rather not see any of their production specifics

(34:35):
spilled in print when they were fighting 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

(34:55):
wanted to 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 temperature changes than its

(35:16):
predecessor had been. This became the standard for rainwear use.
You can find lots of old pictures of storefronts of
good Year raincoat stores. Yes, I will tell a slight
story about that in our behind the scenes. Charles McIntosh
did not get a lot of time to marvel at
the advances of vulcanized rubber. He died on July three

(35:40):
from influenza. He had made quite a healthy fortune for himself.
In a sensus taken two years before his death, his
household showed that, in addition to the family, a butler
and six other members of how staff were living there.
McIntosh was buried in the churchyard at Glasgow Cathedral. Fourteen
ushers were on hand for the burial, and forty carriages

(36:02):
carried the grieving parties to the service. Although Macintosh 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.

(36:23):
Much the same way that trademarked words like Kleenex and
coke have become more generically used for things like tissue
and soda, the macintosh has come to mean almost any
kind of raincoat, and it's sometimes even applied to garments
that aren't waterproof, and that's not something that happened just conversationally.
There are print catalogs from as early as the nineteen

(36:46):
twenties with British retailer herods calling all of their raincoats
macintosh is uh with that K in the spelling. Yes,
there are lots of weird arguments. You can also find
and online about people debating over whether it should always
be capitalized or not, or if it has just become

(37:06):
a noun on its own. There have, of course, been
many many advancements in rainwear since Charles Macintosh's death, and
textile technology continues to evolve, 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

(37:26):
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 cumber Old Scotland. To work at
Macintosh as a coatmaker, you have to apprentice for three years,
learning their specific techniques for production. They regularly partner with
high end designers now to produce their rainwear lines because

(37:48):
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 to a thousand euros.
They're beautiful, I see why. They're beautifully tailored. Um, but
definitely not something for uh the everyman anymore. Uh. That

(38:13):
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. Do
you have some listener mail before we get to that.
I do. I have a listener mail from our listener,
Meredith where we talked about another invention, and that was
from our last eponymous food episodes. Um and I want

(38:35):
to make sure I let Meredith know her mom was
not incorrect, So Meredith rights, just listen to the latest
Eponymous foods episode. I love those, and I have to
share my own misapprehension of the name of Salisbury steak.
I heard when I was a kid in the nineteen eighties,
probably from my mom, that it was a World War
Two era freedom fries sort of situation that Hamburger fell

(38:57):
out of fashion as a name for ground beef patties
because of its association with Hamburg Germany. I have believed
that until you Twoe blew my mind this morning. Thanks
for the great work you do. You're always super informative
and fun to listen to you. Wishing you both happy
Holidays with a picture of my toothless geriatric rescue poodle
who has the name that I'm scared to try to pronounce.

(39:18):
One of them is very long and I would mess
it up in the other is Chumley adorable? Adorable. I
have a soft spot for poodles. So here's the thing.
You're not your mom if she was the one who
told you that was not entirely wrong. It was invented
well before World War Two, but there was a surge
in popularity of Salisbury steak over hamburgers during that time

(39:41):
because of sort of that very reason. Uh so, not
entirely incorrect, although that is not where the name came from.
I just want to make sure, make sure. Uh yeah. Also,
can't I tell you how many times I have made
Salisbury steaks since we did that episode. I had to
make some for the pictures we used for the episode,
and it turns out I make really good Salsbury stays delicious. Um.

(40:07):
If you would like to write to us, you could
do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
You can also find us as Missed in History on
social media, and if you haven't subscribed yet, super duper easy,
you can do that on the I heart Radio app
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you

(40:27):
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Invention of the Raincoat