Charles Macintosh's birthday

It's a blustery rainy day and I guess that is only appropriate as today would have been Charles Macintosh's 250th birthday.

I have my trench coat, my squall jacket and my general purpose raincoat.

Charles Macintoch's family moved to Glasgow when he was just 11 so that his father could set up a factory, and though the young Macintosh was originally employed as a clerk, he grew up during the Scottish enlightenment and devoted as much time as he could to chemistry.
 
Macintosh experimented with various chemicals and found that naphtha - a by-product of tar - was able to dissolve India rubber, found in trees, and that the resulting paste was able to repel water. By sandwiching the coating between two pieces of cloth, Macintosh was able to create a fabric that, while the outside could get wet, would protect the wearer from water. In 1823, Macintosh was granted a patent on the waterproof fabric.
 
The technology had problems at first: putting stitching in the material could lead it to let water in, and it could get stiff in hot weather.
 
Tailors refused to go near it, and Macintosh set up his own company, which was later merged with that of Thomas Hancock, who had a system many saw as superior, especially once it started to use vulcanised rubber, which improves its durability.
 
Although raincoats ended up in many different guises and styles, and the mac became an all-encompassing term, the Mackintosh company (the k was added by many writers, and stuck) continued. It was bought by Dunlop Rubber in 1925 and continues to the present day despite being on the brink of closure in the 1990s, and its coats now sell for hundreds after a move upmarket.
 
Macintosh had sales of £7.8m in the year to March 2016, with much of its growth in Japan. 
 

Although Macintosh is unsurprisingly best known for his waterproof clothing inventions, he also invented a bleaching powder and figured out a way to make blast furnaces more efficient.