Thomas Hancock

Thomas Hancock was an English coach builder turned manufacturing engineer who founded Britain's rubber industry, inventing in 1820 the masticator, a machine that shredded and recycled scrap rubber. After examining vulcanized rubber samples from the United States that reached England in 1842, he began his own experiments with sulfur and rubber and filed a British patent on the process on November 21, 1843, roughly eight weeks before Charles Goodyear's American patent was granted. Hancock maintained that he had reached the sulfur process through his own experiments rather than by reverse-engineering Goodyear's material, and while the priority dispute between the two men was never resolved to universal satisfaction, Hancock's earlier British filing meant Goodyear could not obtain a British patent of his own. Hancock also found that vulcanizing rubber at a higher temperature produced a hard material he called vulcanite, or ebonite, and he held sixteen patents on rubber processes by 1847.