the.com/mackintosh
The raincoat named after a man who couldn't keep his rubber from smelling like death.
means A raincoat made of rubberized waterproof fabric — especially the classic belted trench style.
from Named after Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist who in 1823 patented a way to waterproof cloth by sandwiching a layer of dissolved rubber between two layers of fabric. The 'k' got added somewhere along the way — nobody's fully sure why, though it may have just slipped in through common spelling drift. His process worked, but early versions had a serious flaw: the rubber solvent (often coal-tar naphtha) made the coats smell rank, and they'd stiffen in cold weather and turn sticky in heat before vulcanization later fixed the problem.
- inventor
- Charles Macintosh, Scottish chemist, patented 1823
- the smell
- rubber-rubber sandwich stank until vulcanization fixed it
- spelling drift
- brand added a k somewhere along the way
- not
- unrelated to the apple-flavored toffee or the computer