The first waterproof raincoat, Mackintosh, was sold in 1824 and named after its Scottish inventor Charles Macintosh.
US chemist Charles Goodyear is credited with discovering how to vulcanise rubber in 1839 after he accidentally spilled a mixture of rubber and sulphur on a hot stove. His discovery made rubber much more useable (preventing it from becoming sticky in hot weather) and triggered a rubber boom.
By the mid-1880s the city of Manaus in Brazil was at the centre of this boom. One type of local tree – Hevea Brasiliensis – had become the source of unimaginable wealth. As the industrial revolution accelerated across Europe and engineers needed a material to seal steam cylinders and manufacture tires, shoes and other products, demand for rubber became almost insatiable. Profit margins were very attractive.
In 1876 Sir Henry Wickham, a young British adventurer sailed out of the Amazonian port of Santarem in the ship Amazonas with 70,000 seeds of the Hevea Brasiliensis tree. He arrived back in the UK and under the care of specialists at London’s Kew Botanical Gardens some seeds germinated and grew to maturity. Rubber trees were then shipped to Sri Lanka. At least, that’s the story. There are a lot of question marks over the historical detail, but the end result was that the British Empire got hold of viable trees and planted them in Sri Lanka and Singapore.
South American Leaf Blight wiped out much of the South American plantations. However those planted in south East Asia thrived, becoming the centre of natural rubber production today.
Scottish inventor, John Boyd Dunlop invented the first commercially viable pneumatic (air-filled) rubber tyre in 1882. First used in bicycles, it went on to become an important feature of motor cars.
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