Big Mac
The adage “muck and money go together”, recorded by John Ray in A collection of English proverbs (1678), might well have served as the Macintosh family motto. Father George, a dye manufacturer, sent round collectors to pay the poorer denizens of Glasgow for their urine, from which he extracted ammonia. This he used in the manufacture of cudbear, a valuable violet-reddish dye obtained from lichens, which his son, Charles, supplied from Europe.
By 1786 when he was twenty, Charles had branched out on his own, opening a factory in Glasgow producing ammonium chloride and Prussian blue dye. A chip off the old block, he would collect soot and urine, from which he extracted salt. His ability to extract alum from waste shale from the area’s coal mines led him to establish Scotland’s first alum works at Hurlet in Renfrewshire in 1797, introducing the manufacture of lead and aluminium acetates to Britain.
It was his collaboration with Charles Tennant, the owner of a chemical works at St Rollox, just outside Glasgow, that made his fortune. Hitherto, bleaching textiles involved boiling them in a weak alkali solution and then exposing them to sunlight for months, a process that was both time-consuming and expensive. In 1799, with the assistance of Macintosh, Tennant created a bleaching powder from the chemical reaction between chlorine and dry slaked lime.
The powder, effective, relatively cheap, and easily transportable, was commercially successful, transforming the textile industry and, by the 1830s, making the St Rollox chemical works the largest in Europe. Bleaching powder was used industrially to bleach cloth and paper well until the 1920s.
Macintosh soon spotted another opportunity from another seemingly unwanted waste material, the tar sludge created from the manufacture of coal gas used to power the new-fangled gas lighting that lit up public thoroughfares and the homes of the well-to-do in the early 19th century. In 1819 he contracted with the Glasgow Gas Company to buy all their waste product. They were only too happy to oblige.
Charles discovered that he could distil the tar to produce a volatile, oily liquid hydrocarbon mixture known as naphtha. While it could be used for flares, Charles continued to experiment to see whether naphtha could be used for even more useful and profitable purposes. His light-bulb moment came when he discovered that it could dissolve India-rubber.
By pressing a solution of India-rubber dissolved in naphtha between two layers of fabric rather like a sandwich, Charles found that the rubber interior formed a barrier that was almost completely water resistant and yet left the fabric flexible enough to be used in a garment. It did not take long for a man with his finely attuned commercial acumen to realise that for those exposed to the vagaries of the British weather a coat that was truly waterproof was manna from heaven.
On June 17, 1823, Charles received a patent (No 4804) for a process “for rendering the texture of hemp, flax, wool, cotton, silk, and also leather, paper and other substances impervious to water and air”. Reports suggest that the first coat made from Charles’ material was sold in Glasgow on October 12, 1823, less than four months after he had received his patent.
