There could be many "mackintosh men". Perhaps the best known, and certainly so in his native Scotland, is Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the celebrated Glasgow architect who died in 1928, and whose distinctive oeuvres are landmarks in his native city.
Another mackintosh man made a cameo appearance in James Joyce's Ulysses. "Wonder who was that chap at the grave in the brown mackintosh," Bloom muses to himself as he dwells upon the funeral. Later he warms to the theme in his enigmatic style: "By Golly, whatten tunket's yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at his wearables . . . Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon." Others with a taste for enigmas of a different kind might associate the phrase with Paul Newman's portrayal of a spy in the 1973 film The Mackintosh Man. But meteorologists would immediately think of rain and say the original mackintosh man must surely be that other Scottish Charles, the inventor of the protective apparel that still bears his name.
When Columbus and his colleagues landed in the New World in the 15th century they noticed that its inhabitants had great sport with a hard bouncy substance that rebounded high into the air from solid surfaces. It was known locally as caoutchouc, , and was made from the hardened juice of certain trees. Samples of this interesting material were carried back to Europe, but 200 years elapsed before a use for it was found.
Joseph Priestly, later the discoverer of oxygen, was the first to point out that the substance was very effective for "wiping from paper the marks of a blacklead pencil". He therefore gave it the rather uninspiring name of "rubber". Twenty years later, in 1791, one Samuel Peel of London found another use for rubber when he patented a process for spreading it, dissolved in turpentine, over the surface of a piece of cloth to make the cloth waterproof. However, although the material did indeed repel the rain, it was unpleasantly sticky and had a very nasty smell.
And then the mackintosh arrived. In 1823 Charles Macintosh, a chemist, was trying to find a use for the residue left over when gas is made from coal. He discovered that naphtha, made from coal tar, had the power of dissolving rubber, and hit on the idea of using the dissolved rubber to hold together two pieces of cloth: the resulting "sandwich" was completely waterproof, without the disadvantages of Peel's arrangement. Soon afterwards he began to manufacture raincoats, and the "mackintosh" quickly became a fashionable and very useful garment. The original Macintosh man died at the age of 77, on July 25th, 1843, 157 years ago today.