Charles Macintosh, chemist and textile businessman, discovered and patented a method of using waste products from the gas industry together with latex to waterproof cloth. At first he may have started manufacturing this waterproof material at his father’s Glasgow dye works, or perhaps at his own premises on Hill Street in the city. In 1824 Macintosh persuaded the influential cotton manufacturers and textile merchants J and Hugh Hornby Birley to build a factory next to their Cambridge Street mill in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, to produce waterproof products.
Macintosh’s waterproofs were not initially popular with polite society, as they had an unpleasant smell. Demand from the armed services, stagecoach travellers and others sustained the business, but it took time to become profitable. Meanwhile another chemist, Thomas Hancock, had improved upon the waterproofing process and patented his own method. From 1825 he and Macintosh slowly began to cooperate, improving their products, until Hancock became a partner in Macintosh’s business in 1831. At this point Hancock and Macintosh merged their businesses. Charles Macintosh and Co acquired a speciality rubber products business belonging to Hancock’s brother in 1833. By 1836 the company was sufficiently successful that the word ‘mackintosh’ was being used to describe any raincoat.
A major fire caused significant damage to the factory in 1838, which was reported in the press at the time.
Charles Macintosh died in 1843. In the same year Hancock discovered the process of rubber vulcanisation (at the same time as Charles Goodyear made the discovery in the United States). Vulcanisation enabled the company to create a range of vulcanized rubberized fabric products as well solid rubber goods. By the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the business won an award and was highly successful.
In 1889 Charles Macintosh & Co became a private limited company.
The company prospered during the First World War, due to the demand for waterproof and rubber materials for the war effort. In 1918 they acquired a larger factory in Brook Street.
In 1925 Dunlop Ltd acquired Charles Macintosh & Co, in order to expand their business in general rubber products. In 1940 part of the mill complex was destroyed in bombing raids, but Dunlop Ltd continued to manufacture rubber goods in the surviving buildings until 2000. The company carried on as a subsidiary of Dunlop until at least the 1960s.
The Dunlop Rubber Company takes its name from John Boyd Dunlop, the first person to put the pneumatic principle into everyday use by making an air filled tube tyre for bicycles. However, he was only involved with the company from 1889 to 1894, when he joined a rival firm, Tubeless (Fleuss) Pneumatic Tyre Company.
The original company was the Pneumatic Tyre and Booth's Cycle Agency Ltd, founded in 1888 in Dublin. The name Dunlop Rubber Company was first used in 1889 for a private company created to serve as one of the manufacturing units for the founder company. This founder company changed its name several times: in 1893 to the Pneumatic Tyre Company Limited; in 1896 to the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company Limited and in 1913 to the Parent Tyre Company Limited. In 1931 the founder company went into liquidation.
In the meantime, Harvey Du Cros (who had helped to form the Pneumatic Tyre and Booth's Cycle Agency Ltd.) was providing finance to Byrne Bros., a Birmingham business engaged in the production of general rubber goods. In 1896 Byrne Bros. underwent flotation on the stock market as the Rubber Tyre Manufacturing Company based at Para Mill with the intention of building a new factory, Manor Mills, alongside it. Du Cros purchased the Manor Mills and the Rubber Tyre Manufacturing Company in 1900 and 1901 respectively, and the two companies were amalgamated to form the Dunlop Rubber Company Limited. This company purchased the founder company in 1912.
In subsequent years Dunlop expanded into a vast multinational organisation. By 1946 there were 90,000 shareholders and 70,000 employees with factories in, any different countries, sales outlets in nearly every country, and rubber plantations in Southeast Asia (from 1910). Apart from merely producing tyres, the Dunlop Rubber Company Limited made cycle rims and motor car wheels from 1906, and in 1910 Dunlop developed its first aeroplane tyre and golf ball. In 1914 developed a process of spinning and doubling cotton for a new tyre fabric. A collapse in trade in 1922 after the post-World War 1 boom led to financial and administrative reorganisation, but the inter war period also saw the development of Latex foam cushioning (sold by the subsidiary, Dunlopillo) and expansion by way of new factories in South Africa and India. In 1924 the company expanded into manufacturing tennis balls and in 1925 acquired A. A. Davis, which had tennis racket manufacturing expertise. The company acquired Charles Macintosh of Manchester in 1926.
After World War II (during which Dunlop played a major part as suppliers of tyres and rubber goods to the Allied forces). Dunlop expanded further to produce sports goods, sponge rubber, precision bearings and adhesives. In 1967, the company changed its name from the Dunlop Rubber Company Ltd to Dunlop Ltd, to reflect the more diversified nature of the business and in 1971 Dunlop merged with Pirelli of Italy. The merger was not successful, and was dissolved in 1981. The European tyre business was sold to its former subsidiary, Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd of Japan in 1983 and the following year the remaining tyre factories in New Zealand and India were sold for £200 million. Dunlop Holdings Limited (encompassing the whole company) was bought by BTR plc in 1985.
Date
1806-1933
Scope and ContentCollection of mainly 19th and some 20th century records of the cotton and rubber business Charles Macintosh & Co, consisting mainly of indentures and legal agreements, and gathered as part of the Dunlop Archive Project.
The papers are mainly a series of property deeds dating to 1806-1918, and relating to Macintosh dealings with other Manchester firms including H. H. Birley, John Rylands and Dunlop. There is also a later copy of the partnership indenture between Birley and Macintosh signed in 1831; a plan of the Birley factory in Manchester dated 1842; a sales ledger for the Macintosh company for 1845 to 1926.
Further material includes a packet of 20th century documents comprising a handwritten list of a collection of Dunlop and Macintosh documents and including many photographs of these records. This includes material relating to dealings with the New Eccles Rubber Works Ltd, the Shrewsbury ST & Chilliner Tyre Co Ltd, as well as a company history from 1904, amongst other items.
A few documents and booklets relate to shareholding, Dunlop Ltd and its subsidiaries. This includes ‘the Transmission Belt Handbook’ Macinlop Ltd, Manchester, c1920-30s, two copies of the ‘Hose Handbook’ produced by Macinlop, two documents and a copy of the Memorandum and Articles for the Dunlop Rubber Company Limited, June 1959.
A small number of items relate to the Macintosh family, including a photograph of a plaque for Charles Macintosh, a booklet in memory of Councillor John Macintosh of Halifax dated 1920, and a manuscript memoire of Charles Macintosh, dated 1847. This may relate to George Macintosh’s published ‘Biographical Memoir of ... Charles Macintosh, F.R.S., of Campsie and Dunchattan. Compiled and edited from authentic documents’ (Glasgow: W.G. Blackie & Co, 1847). The author (son of Charles Macintosh) and date would support this, but a later note attached suggests that it relates to another article.
Extent6 boxes and 1 oversized item
Physical descriptionThe archive is in a good condition.
LanguageEnglish
Archival historyDunlop Ltd acquired the Charles Macintosh & Co business in 1925. The present Macintosh papers were part of a collection of historic objects and archives gathered by Dunlop Ltd in the 1970s- early 1980s from across their businesses. The Dunlop Archive Project, which identified and listed business records held by the company, was part of this scheme aimed at creating a company museum. Papers, including the present material, were given ‘AP’ references. The takeover of Dunlop by BTR in 1985 led to the cancellation of the museum project and the collections were dispersed to new owners. The papers were transferred by BTR to the donor as archivist of the Plastics Historical Society.
Rylands & Sons was established in Wigan in 1819, from a partnership between John Rylands, his brothers Joseph and Richard and their father Joseph Rylands. The company manufactured and distributed linen. The family had traditionally been handloom weavers, producing fine linens.
The company opened its first warehouse in Manchester in 1822 and subsequently extended its operations into dyeing and bleaching in 1824, cotton spinning in 1830, and power-loom weaving in 1839. John Rylands became the sole proprietor of the business in 1842. The company opened a warehouse in London in 1849, and withdrew from linen manufacture in 1854 in order to concentrate upon the cotton industry. The success of the company meant that John Rylands was Manchester’s first millionaire, and from 1857 he was the greatest textile merchant in the land. The company took advantage of the crisis caused by the cotton famine to expand operations by buying up mills and machinery cheaply. In 1863-1865 the company built model mills at Wigan. In 1873 the firm was incorporated as a limited company, with a capital of £2 million. John Rylands retained control of the company but opened up shareholding to clients and employees, in harmony with the contemporary enthusiasm for ‘industrial partnership’. From 1872 the firm expanded into the manufacture of ready-made clothing, and from 1874 began to display its wares at international exhibitions in Europe, America and Africa, winning prizes at Cape Town in 1877 and at Paris in 1878. Between 1860 and 1877, its workforce increased from 2,000 to 12,000, employed across seventeen mills and forty-two departments within its warehouses. The company was recognised as the leader of the cotton trade in manufacture, finishing, and distribution.
Rylands & Sons was not a typical cotton-manufacturing firm. It stood apart from other business through its immense size, its integrated operations, its dependence on the home market, and its merchant functions. John Rylands was the driving force behind the company’s successful expansion, frequently working 12-19 hours a day over the length of his career. Rylands’ financial acumen meant that the company’s costs were strictly controlled and each department was expected to function efficiently and independently. The company had a high reputation for the quality of his wares. That reputation was maintained through the use of trade marks. After John Rylands’ death in 1888, the chairmanship of the board was placed in commission and was rotated during 1889–1900 between Rylands’ most trusted managers, Reuben Spencer (1830–1901), William Carnelley (1821–1919), and James Horrocks (1832–1895). The manner in which John Rylands had structured the company meant that it continued until 1989, a period of existence of 170 years.
Thomas Hancock was the second son of James Hancock, a timber merchant and cabinet-maker at Marlborough, Wiltshire, where he was born on the 8 May 1786. He was educated at a private school in Marlborough, before moving to London. By 1815 he was in parthership with his younger brother John as a coach builder.
By 1819 he had become interested in the uses of rubber. His experiments to dissolve and manipulate solid rubber began in 1819 and his first patent, of 1820, covered the application of rubber to various articles of dress, to make them more elastic. He eventually made use of thin strips of Pará rubber and produced numerous articles including braces, waistbands and straps at his new factory in Goswell Road. Observing that two freshly cut surfaces of rubber readily adhered by simple pressure, he was led to the invention of the ‘masticator’, as it was afterwards called, in which a roller set with teeth chewed up pieces of rubber and worked them into a plastic and homogeneous mass. The rubber that emerged from the masticator was then pressed into blocks, or rolled into sheets. The masticating process was never patented, but remained a secret in the factory until about 1832, when it was divulged by a workman. Experiments showed that masticated rubber was much more easily acted upon by solvents than ordinary rubber, and this discovery brought Hancock into communication with Macintosh, the well-known manufacturer of waterproof garments, who carried on business in Manchester. In February 1826 Hancock obtained a licence from Macintosh for the use of the patent to produce double-layer fabrics sealed with rubber. Hancock's masticated rubber was better able to dissolve as a strong solution than that of Macintosh, and in 1830 they agreed that Hancock would supply Macintosh with his masticated rubber. Eventually Hancock became a partner in the firm of Charles Macintosh & Co., though he still carried on his own business in London.
Thomas' brother John died of consumption in 1835, leaving nine children. They returned to London and were taken in, educated and provided for by Thomas, who remained unmarried and childless his whole life.
Rubber articles still possessed serious defects due to the material itself; they became sticky, and at low temperatures lost their elasticity. In 1842 specimens of ‘cured’ rubber, prepared in America by Charles Goodyear according to a secret process, were exhibited in England. Hancock investigated the matter, suspected that sulphur was involved, and filed a provisional patent on 21 November 1843. His experiments were successful: he discovered that when rubber was immersed in molten sulphur a change took place, yielding ‘vulcanized’ rubber, which was capable of resisting extremes of heat and cold, and was very durable. He was thus able to submit his specification during the six months allowed by the Patent Office. Goodyear had not applied for a British patent. Hancock also discovered inadvertently that if the vulcanizing process was continued, and a higher temperature employed, a hard substance, known as vulcanite or ebonite, was produced. This material was found to be impervious to chemicals and to be electrically insulating, which made it of considerable value to industry.
Hancock took out sixteen patents in all relating to rubber between 1820 and 1847. He displayed remarkable ingenuity in suggesting uses for what was practically a new material, and the specifications of his patents cover the entire field of rubber manufactures, though many of his ideas were not carried out at the time. In 1857 he published 'Personal Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or Indiarubber Manufacture in England’.
He retired between 1842 and 1845, handing over his business interests to his nephew James Lyne Hancock, and the factory continued in production until 1939, having been taken over by the British Tyre and Rubber Company Ltd. He died of heart and kidney disease on 26 March 1865, at Marlborough Cottage, Green Lanes, Stoke Newington, where he had lived for fifty years.
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