Being waterproof, the new material suggested business possibilities – waterproof boots and socalled ‘Mackintosh fabric’ for raincoats, for example. But in summer heat the material melted, and in winter cracked. Charles Goodyear, around 1839, accidentally discovered that heating latex with sulfur created a permanent elastic solid.
In England, solid rubber tyres for horse-drawn vehicles were made as early as 1835, but 10 years later R.W. Thomson, a Scots civil engineer in Middlesex, used vulcanisation to create a 5in wide pneumatic single-tube pneumatic tyre (meaning there