The Hancocks of Marlborough: Rubber, Art, and the Industrial Revolution: A Family of Inventive Genius , John Loadman and Francis James
Oxford U. Press, New York, 2010. $49.95 (274 pp.). ISBN 978-0-19-957355-4
Thomas Hancock (1786-1865) has often been accused of stealing the British patent for vulcanized rubber from under the nose of Charles Goodyear. He is exonerated by John Loadman and Francis James in their lively biography of him and his brothers, The Hancocks of Marlborough: Rubber, Art, and the Industrial Revolution—A Family of Inventive Genius. The book also reveals how Thomas’s unrivaled understanding of the technology of rubber production facilitated his independent invention of the vulcanizing process.
The Hancock family story is essentially the story of the British rubber industry. Few important industries have suffered such neglect by historians, which is surprising since Thomas Hancock handed us an unusually coherent and intimate source of information in his Personal Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or India-Rubber Manufacture in England (1857). His brother Walter was equally helpful in publishing his Narrative of Twelve Years’ Experiments (1824-1836) … of Employing Steam-Carriages on Common Roads … (1838), which detailed technical successes that ended in commercial failure when the smart money abandoned the roads and took to the rails.
However, The Hancocks of Marlborough is not the book for readers who want an up-to-date history of the British rubber industry. The authors tacitly admit as much in their appendix, “The Evolution of the Rubber Industry Today,” a 12-page summary of two centuries of technical and business developments, for which there was insufficient space in their chapters. A more comprehensive account is found in Loadman’s earlier monograph, Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber—A Modern Marvel (Oxford University Press, 2005). The book is also not an orthodox business history of the type that takes a single company as its subject and scrutinizes everything from its balance sheets to its markets and labor relations.
This book is something both less and more than those. It’s an intriguing family-business history—great-aunts and all, across five generations (one of the authors, James, belongs to the sixth)—that illuminates the impact of business dealings on fraternal relationships. Brothers and nephews cooperated with and supported—and sometimes competed against and deceived—each other. The Hancocks of Marlborough reminds us that talent is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. Many would have described Thomas and his five young brothers, who left Marlborough (in the rural southwest of England) for London, as skilled, enterprising, and creative. Thomas, John, and Walter were all mechanically adept inventors and patentees (rubber, coaches, and steam engines, respectively); William and James were cabinet makers like their father; and Charles was a portrait painter. Only Thomas, however, was successful in business, and only he died both wealthy and respected. The authors imply, but offer no full analysis, that Thomas was as shrewd and determined as he was honest and devout, whereas Walter was obsessed with invention and was a poor judge of character, William lacked ambition, and Charles was the naive victim of his own duplicity; John died young, and it appears James did too.
Besides the family history, the book is a treasure house for anyone interested in inventors and how they managed their intellectual property prior to the reform and consolidation in 1852 of the UK’s patent system. Although the cost of a patent that covered England, Wales, and Scotland was not quite as high as the £400 cited on page 24, it was nonetheless very expensive—approximately £100 for both England and Wales, and an additional £100 each for Scotland and Ireland. It is evidence of Thomas’s financial well-being that he was able to file at least 14 patents, as he describes it, “for the treatment and application of India rubber,” which he collected and republished in 1853 to assert his priority, and that he prosecuted infringements of them in England’s notoriously expensive courts. To what extent those patents were also a cause of his wealth merits further analysis. He decided not to patent his second most important invention—the rubber masticating machine—hiding it under a false name (“the pickle”) and trusting his co-religionist workers to keep the secret.
