SYMHC Classics: Raincoats

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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:33Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert, Mick, Bill and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos, we've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.

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• 2:15Holly Frey?

  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.

• 2:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  This originally came out January 23rd, 2023. Enjoy.

• 2:35Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:46Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:51Holly Frey?

  So Tracy, I'm sure you have heard of a jacket being called a Macintosh.

• 2:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh huh.

• 2:57Holly Frey?

  And these days, lots of jackets are called that.

• 3:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  It became kind of a generic.

• 3:02Holly Frey?

  Always correctly. It really means a raincoat. And if you want to get grander, 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, 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 furs, tightly woven wool fibers, and even oiled and waxed fabrics have been used around the world by various peoples to try to keep the rain and moisture

• 3:43Holly Frey?

  at bay. But figuring out how to manufacture clothes with rubber was a really big breakthrough that took actually kind of centuries.

• 3:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Holly Frey?

  People really wanted to figure out the rubber puzzle.

• 3:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  I really love looking at pictures of the various kinds of rainwear that different cultures have 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 indigenous 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. Then Europeans, particularly Spanish and Portuguese explorers, adopted this same practice. It was not something that they brought back home with them to Europe,

• 4:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  though. Rubber did not really become something that Europeans paid a lot of attention to until the mid 18th century, when French botanist Francois Fresnoux de la Gatorière started writing about it after spending time studying the plants in French Guiana. Fresnau actually wrote about the possibility of combining rubber with textiles to create waterproof clothing as early as 1749.

• 5:06Holly Frey?

  But though Fresnau and other Europeans who 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 caudchouc, as it was known in Fresnau's writing, and often for a long time, it couldn't really be stabilized for transport. And so reportedly, that raw material would coagulate on the voyage across the Atlantic. Fresnau 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.

• 5:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, enter a repeat character from the podcast. That is Jacques de Volcançant of 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 1700s, who was talking to colleagues about the potential of using rubber in a variety of applications. That certainly increased its profile as a subject of interest. He also communicated the importance of this line of scientific research in the early 1760s. He did that when talking to Henri-Léonard Jean Baptiste Bertin,

• 6:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  who at the time was King Louis XV of France's finance minister.

• 6:35Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he was like, "We should really put some money behind this research, shouldn't we? 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 Maccaire. Despite being very busy in the 1760s 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 Académie des Sciences in 1768. But ether was far too expensive to really ever do anything at a large scale.

• 7:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1779, an Italian 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, Fabroni, 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.

• 8:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Fabroni did see 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 1790s with the most detailed write-ups about it appearing in Italy in 1796. So here it is, this is the first rainwear. Nope, actually not. Petroleum distillate was 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.

• 8:42Holly Frey?

  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.

• 8:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Here's a piece of fabric.

• 8:52Holly Frey?

  Yes, it's a swatch at that point. Uh, 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 Faujoux de Saint-Fond, one of the people who wrote about the Montgolfier brothers and their early ballooning efforts, and another pair of brothers, the Roberters. 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.

• 9:37Holly Frey?

  And there are 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, et cetera.

• 9:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Across the Atlantic Ocean, Spanish scientists working in Mexico were also working on rubber at the end of the 18th century. Diaz de la Vega had been one of several men who had traveled to the Americas to learn more about the plant known as Castilla Elastica, after other Europeans had returned home excited about it. In this case, the effort 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.

• 10:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  We don't really have specifics on the dimensions or the shape of those containers, but it seems like the whole project kind of faded off. It was not really pursued later.

• 10:49Holly Frey?

  I would love to see those. But then in the late 1700s and early 1800s, 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, "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 in the title is the Malaysian island of Penang. And Howison is credited with identifying a rubber-producing plant called Ursiola elastica. And in his paper, Howison stated that older vines of that plant produced the best kaut

• 11:33Holly Frey?

  shuk 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, making himself an entire set of waterproof clothes.

• 11:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  The next person in Europe to work on waterproofing with rubber was really young when he figured some advances out. He was just 18. His name was James Syme and he was a medical student in Scotland. His story is interesting because it butts right up against that of Charles Macintosh, who is credited with inventing the raincoat. In 1818, Syme wrote up his findings that mineral naphtha 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.

• 12:33Holly Frey?

  Other scientists were working with rubber and writing about the various qualities they observed in it during all of this. Dutch physiologist Jan Ingehouds wrote about rubber stickiness in 1779, writing, "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 have been touched by the fingers." A French scientist named Groszard 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

• 13:15Holly Frey?

  in the early 1800s that processed rubber to a desired viscosity for use in a variety of applications, including the types of hoses that Groszard 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, "a united plastic compound."

• 13:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 MacIntosh. So we'll be talking about the man whose name, with a different spelling, is still associated with raincoats in just a moment.

• 14:07Holly Frey?

  Before we get into Charles MacIntosh's story, we're gonna pause for a sponsor break.

• 14:14Speaker 04

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• 14:17Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the

• 16:53Holly Frey?

  Kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:20Speaker 06

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 18:03Speaker 06

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 18:22Holly Frey?

  Charles MacIntosh, that's spelled M-A-C, there's no K in his proper name spelling, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on December 29th, 1799. 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 29th. And there is a photo of the birth and baptism entry for Charles MacIntosh. It is 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.

• 19:04Holly Frey?

  They are in handwritten script, which, you know, anyone's handwriting is tricky, and sometimes that very elegant but very fancy looking script that you'll see in 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.

• 19:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Charles's parents were George Macintosh and Mary Moore Macintosh. George had a factory where dye 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. 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. Glasford. The goal was this position would further develop Charles's knowledge of business. And in his biography, this reads sort of like an apprenticeship,

• 20:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  but sometimes it's characterized more as Macintosh just getting a job as a clerk.

• 20:17Holly Frey?

  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.

• 20:28Holly Frey?

  But regardless of how that position began, the Glasfords and the Macintoshes were friendly. And eventually, both fathers and sons, so four men total, all became business partners. And by this point, Macintosh 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.

• 20:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  He was also a member of the Commercial Society of Glasgow, which existed from 1787 to 1803. This group was formed so that merchants and businessmen in the area could discuss and debate social and political issues that impacted the economy. During this time, Charles Macintosh wrote essays on various happenings of the day, including the late 18th 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 the manufacture of textiles, specifically wool.

• 21:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  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."

• 21:48Holly Frey?

  And these essays were written when Macintosh was still very young. They were all written before he was even 21. 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 salammoniac. This was not a glamorous enterprise. Macintosh's primary sources that he used for extraction of ammonium chloride were soot and urine. And it was difficult to process in the late 1700s, but then it could be sold to metalsmiths and pharmacies. This business only lasted about six years, but during it, Charles was often corresponding

• 22:30Holly Frey?

  with experts in production to refine his process and to use the resources he had available through this venture to perform some additional experiments of his own and expand the company's offerings.

• 22:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Not long after the company formed, Charles started traveling around Europe to make sales deals. This involved having a lot of pluck for a man in his early 20s, but to be clear, he had a lot of help 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 Macintosh returned to Scotland, he brought back some knowledge as well, including of new innovations in chemistry. According to an early 19th century Scotland Statistics report, it was Charles Macintosh who introduced the production of acetate of lead and acetate of alumina into Britain.

• 23:25Holly Frey?

  Macintosh wrote about this in a letter to a business associate several years later in 1800. 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 the manufactured article, when sent back to us, should become loaded upon its arrival with a duty of three pence per pound. On my return to Glasgow, I attempted to make sugar of lead and was successful in making a salt equal in quality to the Dutch. I established a manufactory of it in the year 1786, which, as you know, has been going on pretty successfully ever since."

• 24:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 Macintosh because lead acetate, as it is more commonly known today, is a dye 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 supplanting the Netherlands as the main exporter in Europe of lead acetate. Macintosh had not patented his process, though, so a lot of other manufacturers jumped into

• 24:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  production as well.

• 24:54Holly Frey?

  Macintosh got married to Mary Fisher in 1790. They most likely met through one of Macintosh'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.

• 25:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Macintosh was involved in 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 and Company's refined malt vinegar for 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.

• 25:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  This vinegar will be found equal in strength and flavor to the strongest French white wine vinegar over which it possesses many advantages.

• 26:05Holly Frey?

  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 versions of the raincoat creation story, they state that in 1823, Macintosh was kind of working on a sustainability project. He wanted to find uses for the coal tar naphtha that was produced in gas works. So naphtha is an oily liquid that's produced when natural gas condensates 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.

• 26:47Holly Frey?

  But as we've discussed, a lot of scientists were working to get to a way to work with rubber and naphtha had already been arrived at as a really viable option in that quest.

• 26:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Macintosh 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 1819, Macintosh made an agreement with the Glasgow Gas Works to buy the waste products that were left after using coal to make gas. Those products were tar and ammonia 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.

• 27:40Holly Frey?

  So the actual invention, 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 masticator 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 its being possible to render this also useful from its powers as a solvent of kauchuk or India rubber. By exposure to the action of the volatile oil termed naptha obtained from the coal tar, he converted this substance

• 28:21Holly Frey?

  into a waterproof varnish, the thickness and consistency of which he could vary according to the quantity of naptha which he employed in the process."

• 28:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 kauchuk, which was a term 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. The India is a reference to the West Indies, not the Indian subcontinent.

• 29:11Holly Frey?

  Yes, in that way that many 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 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 waterproof ...proofing fabric on June 17th, 1823.

• 29:54Holly Frey?

  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 other companies that had the Macintosh name attached.

• 30:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 Stuff You Missed in History Class going.

• 30:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 31:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:31Speaker 06

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option, too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating U.S. restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 32:14Speaker 06

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and Sauces today.

• 32:26Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 34:00Holly Frey?

  The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 34:13Holly Frey?

  So this invention of 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 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.

• 34:55Holly Frey?

  Additionally, sometimes 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 product that grows out of an animal. And 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 the

• 35:37Holly Frey?

  action that was in play here. 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 you consider that each seam essentially was a line of tiny perforations and that water could soak through all of those, you can see how it's a problem.

• 36:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  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. 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 aesthetically very great. The only color they came in was a drab green. And to top things off, they smelled pretty bad. And this was such an issue, they smelled so bad, that they were banned on public transportation in some cities.

• 36:53Holly Frey?

  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 Macintosh 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 Macintosh had told them that they need to glue the seams rather than just stitching. But 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,

• 37:37Holly Frey?

  Macintosh just started production on garments in his own factory.

• 37:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is a really significant moment in clothing history for a reason other than waterproofing. Charles Macintosh was one of the first garment manufacturers to create clothing in mass production. Most clothing in the 1820s 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 Ford in the early 1900s. But Macintosh was 80 or 90 years ahead of them with a garment assembly line. Workers would be assigned to a particular part of the garment

• 38:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  and then the pieces would move on to the next station in another part of the factory.

• 38:29Holly Frey?

  Completely different from the idea of going to a tailor and having a garment made and they do the whole thing.

• 38:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, or making your own garment at home.

• 38:37Holly Frey?

  Yeah. The ready availability of the Macintosh raincoat, once all of this was up and running, actually hurt 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 a tartan lining to reference its inventor's Scottish heritage, have persisted, and today they're seen as marks of quality.

• 39:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Initially, the target market for Macintosh's raincoat consisted of sportsmen and domestic workers like coachmen and footmen. This sounds pretty specific, but it covered the bases 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 the most part, this gear was really geared toward men until women's Macintoshes were introduced.

• 39:45Holly Frey?

  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 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 applying water and seeing if any passed through.

• 40:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1825, he started collaborating with Thomas Hancock, and Macintosh 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.

• 40:40Holly Frey?

  In 1830, a factory in Manchester was established to make Macintosh rainwear, 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 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.

• 41:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 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.

• 41:35Holly Frey?

  That led to other manufacturers using Macintosh's process. Specifically, a company called Everington & Son was a silk dealer, which was headed by a man named Wynn Ellis. Both Macintosh and Hancock were eager to protect their patents and their markets, so they sued. And in February 1836, Macintosh versus Everington & Ellis was tried in the Court of Commons.

• 41:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  As part of the defense's case, it was revealed that at least two years before Macintosh had gotten the patent 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 Macintosh would have known, and he did hold a patent. So even if Green had shared this with the firm of Everington & Son, there was no legal ownership of the process on their part. One of the points made by Thomas Hancock during the trial

• 42:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  was the fact that his employee sharing what he knew was a secret meant that the work he and Charles Macintosh did together was original in nature.

• 42:53Holly Frey?

  Yeah, like, if everybody knew about this already, why did my employee have to secretly blab it?

• 43:00Holly Frey?

  During the lawsuit, the Attorney General pointed out how very synonymous Macintosh 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 Arcrite's 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, Macintosh 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.

• 43:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  According to newspaper accounts, 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. Macintosh had to go to the Court of Chancery 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 June 17, 1837, which was just a year later. Macintosh did not get that extension, so all of that battle was really just for the benefit of a year of patent protection.

• 44:15Holly Frey?

  There's an interesting note here about Hancock and his ongoing secrecy and protection of his patent and Macintosh's. 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 rather not see any of their production specifics spilled in print when they were fighting so hard against the theft of them to begin with.

• 44:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Just a few years after the lawsuit, a new technology emerged that totally changed the raincoat industry. Vulcanized rubber was introduced in 1839. This was the work of Charles Goodyear. Goodyear 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 in 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. You can find lots of old pictures of storefronts of Goodyear raincoat stores.

• 45:38Holly Frey?

  Yes, I will tell a slight story about that in our behind the scenes. Charles Macintosh did not get a lot of time to marvel at the advances of vulcanized rubber. He died on July 25th, 1843, from influenza. He had made quite a healthy 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. 14 ushers were on hand for the burial and 40 carriages carried the grieving parties to the service.

• 46:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Macintosh was the brand name of the coat made by Charles Macintosh'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 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 1920s with British retailer Harrods calling

• 47:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  all of their raincoats "Macintoshes," with that K in the spelling.

• 47:07Holly Frey?

  Yes, there are lots of weird arguments you can also find online about people debating over whether it should always be capitalized or not.

• 47:17Holly Frey?

  Or if it has just become 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 company has also evolved over the years. The raincoats are still made by hand with old-school methods in a factory that's now encumbered in 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 the name is so synonymous with quality.

• 48:02Holly Frey?

  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 1,000 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.

• 48:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, yay. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy.

• 49:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  Publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 50:05Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 50:36Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.