The History of Raincoats

People have been trying to make items of clothing waterproof for hundreds of years. As early as the thirteenth century, Amazonian Indians used a milky substance, rubber, extracted from rubber trees for this purpose. When European explorers came to the America in the sixteenth century, they observed the indigenous people using a crude procedure and rubber to waterproof items like footwear and capes.

By the eighteenth century, Europeans were experimenting with waterproofing fabric for clothing. François Fresneau devised an early idea for waterproofing fabric in 1748. Scotland's John Syme made further waterproofing advances in 1815. In 1821, the first raincoat was manufactured. Made by G. Fox of London, it was called the Fox's Aquatic. The raincoat was made of Gambroon, a twill-type fabric with mohair.

These early attempts at waterproofing fabrics involved rubber so they were not exactly successful. Because of the rubber, the articles were not easy to wear. If the weather was hot, the clothing became supple and tacky and if it was cold, the clothing was hard, inflexible. But this problem was solved by Macintosh in the early nineteenth century.

He was a chemist and chemical manufacturer. Through experiments, Macintosh discovered a better way to use rubber in clothing. At the time, the gas industry was new. In 1836, he invented a method for combining rubber with fabric, which was used in the first modern raincoats. “Coal-tar naphtha” was one byproduct of the fractional distillation of petroleum, which was used in gasworks. Macintosh dissolved rubber in naphtha, making a liquid. This liquid was brushed on fabric making it waterproof.

Americans continued to improve on Macintosh's process with the advent of the calendering process in 1849. Macintosh's cloth was passed between heated rollers to make it more pliable and waterproof. Another innovation involved the combination of only one layer of cloth with a layer of rubber.

Innovations in fabrics continued to affect raincoats. Wool blends and synthetic blends were regularly used to make raincoats beginning in the 1950s. In the 1960s, nylon was used to make raincoats, and in the 1970s, double-knit became a preferred fabric. The modern day raincoats come in many fabrics, styles and colors.