Mackintosh
| Private sector | |
| Industry | Textile industry |
| Founded | Glasgow, 1846s |
| Headquarters | Cumbernauld, Scotland |
|
Key people
|
Charles Macintosh, Founder |
| Products | Rubberised coats and accessories |
| Owner | Yagi Tsusho |
| Website | mackintosh |
The Mackintosh or raincoat (abbreviated as mac or mack) is a form of waterproof raincoat, first sold in 1824, made out of rubberised fabric.
The Mackintosh is named after its Scottish inventor Charles Macintosh, although many writers added a letter k. The variant spelling of "Mackintosh" is now standard.
Although the Mackintosh coat style has become generic, a genuine Mackintosh coat is made from rubberised or rubber laminated material.
It has been claimed that the fabric was invented by the surgeon James Syme, but then copied and patented by Charles Macintosh; Syme's method of creating the solvent from coal tar was published in Thomson's Annals of Philosophy in 1818; this paper also describes the dissolution of natural rubber in naphtha.
However, an exhaustive history of the invention of the Mackintosh was published by Schurer in 1952. The essence of Macintosh's process was the sandwiching of an impermeable layer of a solution of rubber in naphtha (derived from tar) between two layers of fabric. Syme did not propose the sandwich idea and his paper did not mention waterproofing. Waterproofing garments with rubber was an old idea, and was practised in pre-Columbian times by Aztecs, who impregnated fabric with latex. Later, French scientists made balloons gas-tight (and incidentally, impermeable) by impregnating fabric with rubber dissolved in turpentine, but this solvent was not satisfactory for making apparel.
In 1830 Macintosh's company merged with the clothing company of Thomas Hancock in Manchester. Hancock had also been experimenting with rubber coated fabrics since 1819. Production of rubberised coats soon spread all over the UK. Every kind of coat was produced with rubberized material including riding coats and coats supplied to the British Army, British railways, and UK police forces.
Early coats had problems with smell, stiffness, and a tendency to melt in hot weather, but Hancock further improved his waterproof fabrics, patenting a method for vulcanising rubber in 1843 which solved many of the problems.
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Wikipedia