Two hundred years ago, in 1823, Scottish clerk-turned-chemist Charles Macintosh patented a new process for a waterproof fabric. He had been looking for uses for waste-products from gasworks, and using rubber dissolved in naphtha (a substance derived from coal tar), he sandwiched together two pieces of cloth – the waterproof coats he then made (later improved by using vulcanised rubber) became classic British icons of rainwear: the mackintosh (sic) or mac.
Strokes of genius, accident, stubborn determination: all have played their part in great British inventions. Here we take a look at a few more.
Communications pioneers
It is hard to imagine life without computers and the World Wide Web, but while the latter, invented by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, embraced the globe in a whirlwind, the former took rather longer to catch
