Rain Read online

  Thriving on Scotland’s rain and mist, the country’s abundant lichens are central to its textile history; the fawn colors (and slightly funky smell) of Harris tweed come from lichens in the Parmelia genus. Most cudbear manufacturers used a Scottish lichen called Ochrolechia tartarea, but George Macintosh imported more-exotic types from the Italian island of Sardinia. In his twenties, Charles Macintosh traveled across Europe for months at a time to scout lichens, flowers, and plants for potential new colors and materials, or to meet with possible business partners. His surviving papers don’t indicate how long he had pondered waterproof cloth in the years or decades before his famous brainstorm. Perhaps it crossed his mind as he walked the puddled cobblestone streets of Glasgow, or in the spring of 1789, when he experienced a terrifying storm in the passage between Sunderland on the east coast of England and Rotterdam in Holland. On that trip he visited the Kingdom of Prussia to try to land the contract for dyeing the Royal Prussian Army’s uniforms blue. Macintosh always seemed more comfortable with the chemistry than the commerce. The Prussians turned him down. Surely he would have clinched the deal if he could have kept them dry as he perfected their blue hue.

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  In the ethos of his father’s generation of dye makers who sourced ammonia from Glasgow’s human urine stream, Macintosh had a nothing-wasted mind-set. His discovery of the long-sought solvent for rubber came out of his search for uses for some of the nastiest by-products of early nineteenth-century progress. Gas lamps were becoming popular in the cities of Europe, lighting up the wealthier streets and private homes. But the tar sludge left behind in the manufacture of coal gas was a public menace—growing in piles in the Thames in London and the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh. Macintosh saw practical uses in the sludge and wastewater, which included valuable ammonia. In 1819, Glasgow Gas Works was only too happy to sign a contract to sell him all the waste it produced; the company had been dumping it into rank pits around the city.

  Macintosh converted the tar into pitch (at that time used to waterproof wooden boats and crates), and separated the ammonia for cudbear. That left him one more by-product. He suspected it might be useful, but it was also a humdinger. The pitch-making left behind a volatile liquid called naphtha. Highly flammable, naphtha put the fire in “Greek fire,” a deadly chemical weapon from ancient times. Arrows dipped in the stuff could arc inextinguishable flames into a village. Shot through a brass cannon in a stream of fire, it could incinerate a line of soldiers or an entire ship. “Every man touched by it believed himself lost, every ship attacked with it was devoured by flames,” wrote a crusader in 1248. Greek fire adhered to victims and kept burning in water, so even jumping into the sea would not quench the flames. Under Pope Innocent II in 1139, the Second Council of the Lateran had decreed it “too murderous” for use in Europe.

  The decree was still honored by the time Macintosh began experimenting with the naphtha from Glasgow Gas. He thought it might be the one substance powerful enough to tame rubber into a waterproofing varnish. The winning recipe turned out to be ten to twelve ounces of shredded rubber combined with a “wine-gallon” of naphtha. Macintosh heated the brew as he ground it into a thin pulp, then ran it all through a fine sieve until it resembled “thin, transparent honey.”

  Macintosh had managed to make a waterproof brew, but it gave fabrics a clammy look and feel—and a smell sickening enough to turn a urine collector’s stomach. Then he had an idea simple and brilliant as a sandwich. He spread his warm honey between two pieces of fabric, and pressed them together using heavy rollers. The resulting cloth was flexible and waterproof. In 1822, he obtained patent number 4,804, for “Waterproof Double Textures.”

  The first mac was born.

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  Macintosh was certain he could sell his textures to clothiers eager to bring waterproof articles to the masses. He set out to build a mill to manufacture his new invention. The only financing he could land required that he locate it two hundred miles south of Glasgow, in the textile behemoth of Manchester, England. His new business partners were a pair of brothers named Birley, owners of a large complex of cotton mills in Manchester’s Chorlton-upon-Medlock district. Hugh Hornby Birley and his younger brother Joseph agreed to finance Macintosh’s rubberized cloth factory. But they remained suspicious enough about the technology and the product that they wanted Macintosh’s mill adjacent to their own. Should he fail, they could absorb the space.

  At first, the Birleys’ skepticism seemed on mark. Even locked between fabrics, the rubber and naphtha were never completely tamed. Like the earlier misfires, Macintosh’s rubberized cloth sometimes melted in hot temperatures or stiffened in the cold. Naphtha’s nauseating odor clung to finished products—like lichen on Harris tweed but much harder to live with. Rough and unrefined, the fabrics did not spark the interest of the fashionable—though a market began to build among the armed forces.

  In a marketing coup in 1824, Macintosh outfitted the Royal Navy officer John Franklin for his third and most successful expedition to the Arctic. When the beloved explorer placed a large order for waterproof canvas, Macintosh threw in a waterproof pillow. Franklin wrote back requesting “four life preservers of a size for stout men, and eighteen bags about six feet long and three broad, fitted with corks for filling with air for the party to sleep on, and four for pillows of the size of the one you gave me.”

  Still, Macintosh was not able to sell his fabrics to the clothiers, even those making coats and cloaks. He needed someone who understood the potential for keeping Europeans dry in the rainy outdoors and at sea, and who could help the public see it. That would turn out to be Thomas Hancock, the British inventor with a mind for mechanics who’d been sketching his articles of rain.

  In 1825, Macintosh agreed to license his double textures to Hancock to make the articles in his books, full of elegant pencil drawings of waterproof coats and trousers, boots and hoods, bathing caps, traveling cushions, hoses, and even tires—six decades before John Dunlop invented rubber tires for bicycles and filled them with air.

  While Macintosh continued to fill orders from the likes of the navy, Hancock got to work trying to improve the fabric for his articles. One advantage he had over Macintosh was an invention he called the masticator. (In the early years of the invention, Hancock obliquely called it “the pickle” to prevent anyone from stealing it.) The machine heated leftover scraps of rubber as it chewed them up, making the material pliable without chemicals. At his large mill on Goswell Road in London, Hancock hitched horses to masticators and large iron rollers to fabricate rubberized sheets he sold in the shipping and yachting industries.

  Once Hancock understood Macintosh’s process, he came up with a blend for the cement—less naphtha and more turpentine—that made the rubber easier to handle and slightly better smelling. But it took years to convince Macintosh to take him on as a partner. The older man was wary, and kept his competitor at arm’s length as they manufactured their waterproof goods separately in London and Manchester. It was not until Hancock’s articles began outselling Macintosh’s that the Scottish chemist brought his rival to Manchester. In 1831, he made Hancock a partner in Macintosh & Co.

  Unlike Hancock, Macintosh never really wanted to make the articles themselves. He would have been happy to manage his considerable chemical concerns back in Glasgow and the rubberized fabric mill at Manchester. He became the world’s most famous raincoat maker reluctantly, only after the clothiers refused to pick up the idea.

  Macintosh and Hancock’s first garments were not rain coats, but rain cloaks. Men and women had worn cloaks, capes, and ground-sweeping mantles since the first century A.D. In the early nineteenth century, the billowing twills were beginning to give way to great-coats—a combination of the cloak and today’s calf-hanging coat. Yet cloaks and capes remained most popular for foul weather, often oiled to deflect rain.

  The two inventors were heartsick to realize that brainstorming the waterproof fabric would be the easy part compared with the struggle to co
nvince people to wear the rainproof cloaks. Physicians were in large part to blame. Some doctors were convinced, and convinced their patients, that although Macintosh & Co.’s cloaks kept out rain, “they stopped perspiration, and hence were injurious to health.”

  Hancock claimed the doctors had an ulterior motive: They secretly feared rain cloaks would make people healthier, cutting into their business. He also blamed the merchants and customers who fit the garments too closely, causing unnecessary perspiration. “Complaints arising from this source long annoyed us, and exposed us to no end of abuse.”

  Seams and buttonholes proved another nightmare. Each stitch acted like a tiny straw that sucked rain inside the coat and soaked its wearer.

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  Europeans’ early disdain for swaddling themselves in waterproof cloth may have been equaled only by their reluctance to hold their own umbrellas. It was as if God didn’t want them to spurn His heavensent creation. At least, not if there was a servant to do it for them.

  In the early eighteenth century, only footmen and servants used umbrellas practically, keeping them ready by the doors of dining rooms and inns to escort clients to and from their carriages. Upper-crust women carried fancy parasols, a matter of haute couture rather than keeping dry. An umbrella in a man’s hand was the ultimate sign of effeminacy. If he had to walk in the rain, a gentleman should wrap himself in a cloak or coat made of beaver felt, and cover his head with a beaver-felt Wellington—just a few of the naturally waterproof articles then driving the breakneck expansion of North America over one furry rodent.

  The slave trader turned abolitionist John Newton, better known for writing “Amazing Grace,” put the social stigma this way: “To carry an umbrella without any headgear places a fellow in a social no man’s land in the category of one hurrying round to the corner shop for a bottle of stout on a rainy day at the behest of a nagging landlady.”

  Ultimately, the Brits had to pick up the umbrella, essential prop in the strut of the derby-hatted gentleman and a stealth weapon for the unarmed Sherlock Holmes. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave him a mac, too.) The umbrella, open or closed, is, like the bicycle, one of humankind’s very few utterly functional inventions that also happen to be completely beautiful. In his charming book about U.K. weather, Bring Me Sunshine, the British author and broadcaster Charlie Connelly professes to love rain. But never does he write so lyrically as in his chapter devoted to the dignified umbrella, “with its smooth, symmetrical flowering as you put it up, the effortless movement and coordination of countless working parts, the elegance of its dome—the umbrella is a beautiful machine.” Seeing one “battered and ruined and shoved into a bin” on the sidewalks of London always sinks Connelly’s heart.

  Connelly celebrates Jonas Hanway as the man who finally democratized the brolly. The respected reformer governed a hospital for deserted children and worked on behalf of many other social causes. Those included fighting the widespread drinking of…tea, newly popular in the London coffeehouses. No doubt shielding himself from the city’s growing proliferation of tearooms, teahouses, and tea gardens, Hanway defied eighteenth-century etiquette to become the first gentleman in London to carry an umbrella everywhere he went. Rain or shine, the article was his signature for thirty years. Hanway ignored the early stares and tongue-wagging. By the time he died in the fall of 1786, umbrellas were becoming must-haves, like the lampposts rising on the damp streets of London. Surely that weather watcher Daniel Defoe and his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe also helped popularize—and defeminize—the umbrella. Defoe’s shipwrecked castaway labors for weeks to make himself a sturdy goatskin umbrella. It’s a gruesome article made of hide and hair, though later artists and book jackets often softened the image, depicting Crusoe’s creation as a pleasant dome of leaves or palm fronds. Crusoe describes his umbrella as clumsy and ugly, but “the most necessary thing I had about me, next to my gun.” It is one of the few memories of his island that he takes back to London upon his rescue. Londoners kept Crusoe’s umbrella in their hearts, too: with the popularity of Defoe’s novel, the British began to call umbrellas “robinsons.”

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  One cloudless November day, I visited Europe’s oldest brolly shop, James Smith & Sons Umbrella Shop, which opened in London in 1830. (Props to Hanway and Defoe.) Wooden and custom-order umbrellas and canes are still handcrafted in the basement. The street-level showroom feels like a magical emporium, just the place where Mary Poppins would have purchased her handled hovercraft. Umbrellas line every inch of wall, handles all facing forward like an army at the ready to battle London’s biggest storm. Still more are gathered like bouquets in wicker baskets on the floor, displayed in glass cases, and hung in windows and racks, classic blacks, greens, and navies in one section, a rainbow of solid colors in another, patterns in another. Sticks and handles shine in solid maple, ash, hickory, and cherry, some decorated with a blue crystal parrot head or a hand-carved hound. A dapper staff of young men also stood at attention, I hoped not facing a lifetime of bad luck for how often they must open an umbrella indoors. I asked a bow-tied salesman my most urgent question: Are they ever asked to customize an umbrella to hide a secret weapon like in the movies? Or real life. The Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was assassinated by a brolly as he waited for a bus on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. He felt a sharp pain on the back of his thigh, and looked behind him to spot a man grabbing up an umbrella and jumping into a taxi. That night Markov developed a fever. He died three days later of poisoning from a ricin-filled pellet. The young salesman told me that James Smith & Sons declines to fashion umbrellas for weaponry. (An answer that led me to surmise they do get asked.)

  Browsing all the useful articles and their brilliantly simple technology, it was hard to believe people once spurned umbrellas. But the Georgian-era Brits who would not carry their own were stuck in the muck of custom. The umbrella was the purview of servants from its earliest design, which seems to have been to protect from sun rather than rain. The first depictions come from hot, arid climates such as Mesopotamia. Just around the corner from James Smith & Sons, at the British Museum, a gypsum wall panel excavated from the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II shows the king clutching some arrows to declare a victory; over his head, a servant holds a parasol on a long stick. The relief is about 3,000 years old. The art writer (and umbrella aficionado) Julia Meech says runners visible in this and other depictions from Mesopotamia suggest the Assyrians invented the first collapsible umbrella. The earliest artifact of an actual umbrella also comes from this part of the world: a wooden top notch with eight socket fittings for ribs, found in an eighth-century Phrygian tomb at the ancient city of Gordion in Turkey.

  In Egypt, the umbrella was associated with the vault of heaven—tied to both sun and rain. Nut, the mother goddess of ancient Egypt, evoked a gigantic parasol, her body sheltering all the Earth. Indian rulers more than 2,000 years ago received a white umbrella at their coronation, representing sovereign power over the world. For Buddhists and Hindus, the umbrella evolved as a symbol of comfort and respect: Remember Lord Krishna lifting Mount Govardhan over his sheepherder friends?

  The umbrella was especially significant in China, where Confucian texts imagined the twenty-eight ribs of a chariot parasol as stars and the central stick as cosmic pillar and axis of the universe. Carried over Zhou kings, the umbrella signified omnipotence as well as practical protection from sun and rain. Ultimately, the Eastern world came to democratize the umbrella just like in the West. In fact, China’s greatest gift to the articles of rain would turn out to be wonderfully humble.

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  The articles of rain are often tough and stout: clumping galoshes, yellow slickers, fishermen’s hats ready for sea. Crinkling open as exquisite exceptions are the oiled paper and bamboo umbrellas of old Asia. So delicate, they would hardly seem matched for a storm.

  The handcrafted umbrellas actually stood up beautifully to rain. They became particularly popular on the island of Honshu, where they are called wa
gasa. Prior to the 1950s, Japan’s streets were filled with them. The artist Stephan Köhler described them as private skies, hovering over every age and class of person.

  Like in the rest of the world, umbrellas in Japan’s earlier history were exclusive articles for nobility and feudal lords, held over heads by hereditary umbrella bearers with strict rules about which colors could shade which rank. Most Japanese fended off rain with sedge hats tied under chin, water-repellent straw capes, and oiled paper raincoats called kappa. But in the late seventeenth century, more and more people in the largest cities began carrying the status-suggesting umbrellas. Around 1800, wagasa exploded as the national daily accessory—thin paper an ideal sunshade, waterproofed with lacquer and fortified with bamboo ribs to deflect even the strongest rains and winds.

  Throughout Japan, wagasa generated a thriving craft economy in umbrella-making districts such as Gifu City, where up to sixteen craftspeople contributed to each one: hand-making the papers and dyes; carving the bamboo stick, intricate ribs, and other parts; stringing the mechanisms with silk thread; painting, oiling, and lacquering; adding special decorations for tea ceremonies or dance. At an industry height in 1950, Gifu City alone produced 15 million wagasa in a year.

  In the late nineteenth century, strange imports with steel ribs began showing up in the hands of foreigners living in the open port of Yokohama. Samurai wanting to appear civilized took to carrying the lightweight Western umbrellas. Japanese people, curious and enthusiastic about the West, soon began to fold up their wagasa. After a short resurgence post–World War II, the industry sank into a steady decline. Today, only a few traditional umbrella makers remain, crafting a small number of wagasa for festivals and professional dancers. Like the kimono and the paper fan, the wagasa is now best remembered in art and dance.

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  In the history of the great articles of rain, skepticism is the common thread. The clever windshield wiper is another example. But, unlike Charles Macintosh and his raincoat, the inventor was never credited for the rubber metronomes that allow us to see the road even in a frog-strangling rain. Meet Mary Anderson, a society belle from Birmingham, Alabama. Like Ada Lovelace, who described how computing machines could solve math problems, or the biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, who was the first to photograph the DNA double helix, you’ve probably never heard of her.