EVERYONE has a plastic mac when I was young. It had the advantage of being totally and absolutely waterproof and could be folded up between showers into a package barely bigger than a sandwich. The snag, of course, was that the rain drained down your trousers, or in the case of the very longest versions, was channelled into your shoe from "just above the heel.
You rarely see a plastic mackintosh today, we all wear anoraks. But the plastic mac, like whist drives, Rinso, Geary's biscuits, primus stoves and country butter, has become a mere memory of an era long since gone.
The origins of the plastic mac can be traced to Christopher Columbus. When he and his colleagues landed in the new world in the 15th century, they noticed its inhabitants had great sport with a hard bouncy subject that rebounded high into the air from solid surfaces. It was locally known 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 the substance was very effective for "wiping from paper the marks of a black lead 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 latter waterproof. However, although the material did indeed repel the rain, it was unpleasantly sticky and had a very nasty smell.
And the mackintosh arrived, Charles Macintosh was a Scottish chemist, who in 1823 was trying to find a use for the residue left over when the 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' with an additional `k' quickly became a fashionable and very useful garment.
So it was for over 100 years until the post war era was summed up in The Graduate by Dustin Hoffman's prospective father in law, Ben, who said "I want to say one word to you, just one, plastics!". But even in the new material, the raincoat continued to be identified with Macintosh, who died on July 25th 1843, 153 years ago today.