At the turn of the twentieth century, when automobiles were still a novelty, drivers rattled about in chaos—frequent breakdowns, no traffic lights to guide them, no filling stations to fuel the high-wheel motor buggies sputtering through cities in the days before Henry Ford’s models for the masses. Driving was a misadventure in clear skies. Come rain or snow, it became misery mechanized. To clear what were then called windscreens of rain and fog, drivers would stretch far out their doors and wipe the screen with their hands. Sopping wet arms were the least of the consequences.
The blessed but slow end to manual windshield wiping began in 1903, after Anderson took a stormy trip to New York. She watched the male drivers making a holy mess and came up with a solution. That June, she applied for a patent: “My invention relates to an improvement in window-cleaning devices in which a radially swinging arm is actuated by a handle from inside a car vestibule,” she wrote in her application. “A simple mechanism is provided for removing snow, rain and sleet from the glass in front of the motorman.”
Anderson’s mechanism consisted of a rubber blade attached to a spring-loaded arm that would sweep across the glass as the driver cranked it from inside. She landed U.S. patent number 743,801. Automotive engineers scoffed. They thought the wiper would distract anyone who had to operate it while simultaneously watching it flap about. Anderson’s patent expired before her idea was widely adopted. By 1916, most vehicles manufactured in the United States came with windscreen wipers as standard.
The following year, another woman entrepreneur, Charlotte Bridgwood, president of the Bridgwood Manufacturing Company in New York, was awarded a patent for the first automatic windshield wiper. Her electric Storm Windshield Cleaner relied on rollers rather than blades. Her patent, too, expired before Henry Ford made automatic wipers a standard feature on his cars just six years later—never acknowledging Bridgwood’s contribution.
In the spirit of the robinson and the mackintosh, I hereby propose that we all start calling windshield wipers “marys,” in honor of their original inventor, Mary Anderson.
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Macintosh and Hancock eventually figured out how to rainproof their seams, by smearing them with rubberized glue, which got a little better-smelling all the time. People started wearing the cloaks and coats correctly. The company caught attention when it designed the Duke of York’s military cloak—a waterproof blue lined with crimson silk. Likewise when army guards began to wear light drab capes by Macintosh & Co., other young men wanted to follow their example, “especially of the drab color,” Hancock wrote.
Charles Macintosh lived to see his waterproof cloaks and coats “take with the public,” as he always thought they should. He died in Glasgow in 1843. One year later, on May 21, 1844, Hancock was awarded the first patent for the vulcanization of rubber. Named after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, the long-sought invention cured rubber by heating it with sulfur, making it as pliable as the European explorers had seen in the South American jungles hundreds of years before. The American inventor Charles Goodyear filed his U.S. patent for vulcanization just three weeks later, and claimed that Hancock had stolen it after a colleague of Goodyear’s shared it with him in London. Goodyear lost a legal battle with Hancock, and died in 1860 with no assets. Hancock lived five years more, dying a wealthy man in London at the age of seventy-nine.
By the 1880s, “mackintosh” was the household name for a raincoat in Europe. When and why the “k” was added remains a mystery. Hancock never uses the misspelling in his journals, so it must have been introduced shortly after his death. The Victorian novelist Mary Augusta Ward reflected the common use in her 1888 bestseller Robert Elsmere. During a breathless deluge, a soaked beauty protests and then submits to wearing the protagonist’s raincoat: “He put the mackintosh round her, thinking, bold man, as she turned her rosy rain-dewed face to him.” By century’s end, mackintoshes were popular in the United States as well. The 1897 Sears Roebuck & Co. catalog offered “Men’s Double Texture Mackintosh Coats, with large full size cape and velvet collar.”
Dunlop Rubber bought Macintosh & Co. in 1925 and continued to sell all the old articles, though its major focus was industrial rubber production and tires. Dunlop made mackintoshes (the “k” by now official) for the British army during World War II, British Rail workers, and London’s Metropolitan Police, which helped give the coat an unlikely sex appeal. Playing tough gumshoes in the 1930s, Humphrey Bogart also showed how dapper a man could look in a mac. When Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn started wearing them, every schoolgirl wanted one, too.
In 1953, Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, were photographed in the pouring rain, he looking archaic in a royal cape of fur, she elegant and modern in a tan-colored mac. Long before a twenty-one-year-old McDonald’s advertising secretary named Esther Glickstein Rose named a new stacked hamburger, and Apple’s Jef Raskin code-named a secret computer project after his favorite apple, the mac was a global brand.
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In the counterculture milieu of the 1960s, any articles popular in the turn-of-the-century Sears catalog—suspenders, ladies’ feather hats, and rococo couches among them—became contemptuously old. The mackintosh began to feel less classic, more old-fashioned. Dunlop, now juggling products from tires to tennis rackets, had dropped the ball on fashion branding. Mackintoshes were now utterly generic, manufactured in hundreds of factories, only a few of which adhered to Macintosh and Hancock’s standards of hand-cut coats with rubberized seams. Cheap new plastics led to tacky “fakintoshes.” Mackintoshes slowly earned a reputation as your grandfather’s raincoat—or a dirty old man’s. The once-respectable coat somehow became associated with flashers, movie-house masturbators, and other sexual deviants. The British slang dictionary Knickers in a Twist carries an entry for the “Dirty Mac”: “a worn and besmirched raincoat synonymous with perverts and gentlemen of the tabloid press.” (Today, old mackintoshes are a favorite article among rubber and raincoat fetishists—the best of both worlds.)
Also during the ’60s, the father-and-son chemical engineers Bill Gore and Robert Gore had been experimenting with polytetrafluoro-ethylene (PTFE for short, a compound used in Teflon pans and circuit boards) in their Newark, Delaware, basement. They were cooking it up in pots, pans, and a pressure cooker when Robert figured out how to stretch the stuff to one thousand times its size. The material was porous but incredibly strong, chemically inert—and breathable. Their family-owned company went on to develop hundreds of medical, industrial, electrical, and textile products from the material, including a fabric they registered as Gore-Tex. While Robert Gore ran the multimillion-dollar firm, his adventuresome parents, Bill and Vieve, went on all manner of camping and hiking adventures to test out the light outdoor products that could stand up to rain. After much trial and flooded-tent error, the first Gore-Tex raingear hit the market in 1976.
It was the biggest revolution in rainwear since Charles Macintosh’s Waterproof Double Textures. Except this time, clothing manufacturers and consumers raced—on runners’ and hikers’ legs, on bikes, and on skis—to outfit themselves in the new articles. Companies all over the world began introducing their own breathable waterproof lines of gear. Now mackintoshes were looking really fusty. It is perhaps no surprise that the man who would restore them in name and style was a Scotsman, born in Glasgow just like Charles Macintosh.
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Growing up east of Glasgow in a post–World War II new town called Cumbernauld, young Daniel Dunko might have seemed an unlikely fashion scion. His father was a displaced Ukrainian who worked as a slabber after the war, building dams across the Highlands, where he met a Scottish girl who would become his wife. The Dunkos had four sons, and moved them to Cumbernauld so they could grow up with a garden and fresh air. Daniel was the spoiled youngest, “the boy allowed to have pudding before the main course.”
Perhaps the indulgence was the entitlement he needed to succeed in fashion and bring back the mac. Dunko left school at sixteen for a training s
pot at a coat factory where his oldest brother worked. Traditional Weatherwear, based in Cumbernauld, was one of the few clothiers that still hand-cut and hand-glued mackintoshes from the old double textures. The company made raincoats for police departments and sewage workers throughout the U.K.—the latter in olive green to hide the stains of the job.
The raincoat maker’s index finger is his most important tool. Plunging it into a pot of strong-smelling glue, he scoops up a blob, carefully smears it along the seams, then reinforces each with a strip of rubberized cotton. After three years as an apprentice, Dunko could not imagine a future confined to the tip of his pointer finger. He appealed to the company’s owner to move him to sales, without success. After two more years, the owner finally relented, warning that should Dunko fail, there would be no tailor’s job to return to. Dunko didn’t know how true that was. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Handsome, with the aquiline face of a young actor and long fingers more suited to spreading swatches than glue, Dunko turned out to be very, very good at selling articles. He pushed the coats to luxury houses like Gucci, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton. In 1996 he was named director of sales. Dunko was convinced the future lay in premium fashion; he wanted the company to give up utilitarian raingear and its dull reputation. Ultimately, the fusion of heritage with high fashion was the charm. Traditional Weatherwear trademarked the name “Mackintosh Made in Scotland,” stitching a Scottish dandy on each label. The line took off. Dunko took out a $100,000 bank loan to acquire a 10 percent stake in the company. In 2000 he rounded up investors to buy it. In 2003, twenty years after joining Traditional Weatherwear as a teen apprentice, Dunko officially changed the name, to Mackintosh Rainwear.
The repurposed mac was a particular hit with the fashion-crazed Japanese. The coats were soon more popular in Japan than in Scotland. Dunko propelled the trend by launching Mackintosh retail stores in Tokyo, dressing in a kilt for each grand opening. Dunko tapped Japanese retail mogul Yuzo Yagi as his importer. Yagi started to court Dunko with an eye toward making Mackintosh part of his retail empire, Yagi Tsusho. Dunko knew the company’s import-export network would solidify Mackintosh as a global brand. He knew Yagi could restore the mac to its pre-pervert heyday, when the coats were worn proudly by the queen and Bogart. What he did not foresee was that Yagi could do all of that without him. After selling Yagi the company for £7.5 million in 2007, Dunko stayed on in Scotland as managing director—only to be edged out four years later amid clashes with the board.
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When I visited Dunko, he had just opened a new raincoat factory in Cumbernauld. In the artfully sparse studio, his oldest brother oversees coat makers who hand-cut the rubberized fabrics in tennis green and honeysuckle red, pushing glue along the seams with muscled pointer fingers. In addition to coats, Dunko is making evocative new articles of raingear, including sea hoods and a waterproof high-top sneaker that’s been picked up by Converse. The items were sketched by a young U.K. inventor two centuries ago. Dunko is building his new company around the memory of Thomas Hancock, and the dream of his articles. He named it Hancock Rainwear.
A few miles away, the Yagi-owned Mackintosh factory operates from the same building where Traditional Weatherwear made coats since 1972, boxed in by a frozen-food conglomerate. The morning I visited, the radio blasted the American pop single “Thrift Shop.” Rich-colored bolts of fabric lined the walls of the high-ceilinged warehouse. The wools, flannels, cottons, silks, and cashmeres were all rubberized in Charles Macintosh’s famous sandwich, but thin and luxurious to the touch. A dozen coat makers were busy hand-cutting, smearing glue with their fingers, and rolling; the same men who pieced together the old macs for sewage workers now handcrafting Mulberry’s new line of twill macs with polka-dotted arms and hoods. As Macklemore rapped about popping tags, I imagined eye-popping price tags; the polka-dot Mulberry would retail the following spring for $3,000.
My tour guide was the production manager Willie Ross, a straitlaced Scotsman whom Dunko hired away from a jeans manufacturer in 1999. Since then, Ross had modernized the factory and its workplace, ventilating the glue fumes and banning the Scotch whisky and cigarettes once sucked on steadily by the coat makers. We talked about the coats’ waterproof properties: Perfect, Ross told me. But the fashionistas are not looking to keep dry. “This is one hundred and twenty percent a fashion item,” he said.
Merchandisers call the mac a “heritage brand,” like Red Wing Shoes from America or Montblanc fountain pens from Germany. Japan has become the hottest market in the world for such brands, and the number one market globally for Mackintosh raincoats. Half of all Mackintoshes are purchased in Japan; the United Kingdom is now the second-largest market.
The dusty historical memorabilia that had collected in the Cumbernauld factory outside Glasgow when Yagi acquired the company has been shined up. Antique tailoring shears and glue pots, rollers and tapes, along with a swatch book and some of the old macs worn by U.K. police at the turn of the twentieth century, have been shipped out of Scotland for display behind shiny glass cases at the company’s flagship store in Tokyo’s high-end Aoyama district.
I could not help but think of the Japanese wagasa umbrellas—one article lost to modernity, another found. I corresponded with a Tokyo artist, Yasuko Horie, part of a new generation trying to bring wagasa back to the Japanese. When they see her articles, “people have the desire to touch the traditional umbrellas, and thus touch a disappearing culture,” she told me. In the fickle history of the articles of rain, perhaps we’ll someday tote exquisite paper umbrellas, a fashion statement to celebrate a disappearing heritage.
SIX
FOUNDING FORECASTER
As a boy, Tom Jefferson was drawn to a peak in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that led him to imagine he could ride above the storms.
The crest rose in the Piedmont of Virginia from his father’s plantation, which was known as Shadwell. Tom was born there in 1743 but spent much of his childhood elsewhere, first at another plantation downstate, and then away at school.
While he mastered Greek, Latin, and French fifty miles from home, young Jefferson looked forward to his adventures back at Shadwell, and to a land and sky he considered ideal. As the defining Blue Ridge had been formed, like him, from a crash of the European and American continents, so the region’s pleasant climate was born of an auspicious collision of two global weather patterns. Cold and storms tracking across the continent from the great mountains of the west mellow at the Piedmont when they meet the warmth of the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf Stream. Temperatures turn milder, rains gentler.
On trips home to Shadwell, settled at his father’s farmhouse near the Rivanna River, the long-limbed boy with freckles and sandy-red hair would set off, by foot or by horseback, about three miles to the base of his enchanting summit. It was another 867 feet to the apex, a steep climb through dense red cedars and fine-layered clouds that cleared at the top for an elysian view of the blue-gray mountains beyond.
The vista drew the boy into “the movements of nature…in a never-ending circle” so fully that he would obsess over the workings of plants and land, animals and atmosphere for all his life. Year upon year, Jefferson would record the date of the first whip-poor-will song, the bloom of the native dogwood trees that lit the misty mountain understory like candelabras—and, for more than five decades, almost every inch of rain that fell upon him.
It was here that, before he became one of the fathers of a nation, Jefferson conceived a more personal dominion he called Monticello, his “little mountain.” “How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature,” he would write in his most intimate description of the place, “to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!”
At twenty-five, Jefferson began to level the mountaintop to create his life’s home. Its domed neoclassical design befitting the lofty vista and occupant, Monticello would become the most famous private residence in America. But, out of character for the draf
tsman of American independence who likewise led the nation’s thinking on architecture and agriculture, science and invention, it was also a famously poor location for a house.
In eighteenth-century America, no one built at such heights. Even Jefferson’s admiring biographer Dumas Malone wrote that his decision to settle on the little mountain “appeared to be flying in the face of common sense.” The challenge for Jefferson was water. Perhaps blinded by his childhood image of riding above the storms, he grasped the problem too late.
Jefferson based his design for Monticello on the principles of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. But he ignored his Renaissance idol’s first choice for locating a villa—at river’s edge, to blend water’s beauty with its utility for daily life.
Along the eastern edge of North America, natives had settled riverside for at least 12,000 years. More recently, ten of the thirteen original British colonies had developed along rivers—vital for transportation, quenching the garden in dry times, or powering a mill like the one Jefferson’s father had built on the Rivanna near the Shadwell estate.
Slave ownership perverted the wisdoms and practicalities of the day. When it came time to sink a well at Monticello, one paid excavator and a crew of slaves dug for forty-six days, through sixty-five feet of mountain rock, to find water—more than double the depth typical for the red-clay soils of Virginia.
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