Hancock, Charles
(1800-1877), Painter & Inventor
Charles Hancock was the eighth son of James Hancock, a cabinetmaker from Marlborough. Little is known about his early life, though he was a talented artist. By the time he was 19, his portrait of his father hung in the Royal Academy. In about 1820 he moved to Norwich, where he studied under James Stark. He became known for his paintings of animals an horses in particular; for a number of years he was commissioned to paint Derby winners and he exhibited at the Royal Academy with a total of 25 pictures.
By 1845 he came to an agreement with Henry Bewley, Christopher Nickels and Charles Keene to create a pool account from the proceeds of working several patents that they owned separately
relating to resin goods in india-rubber and gutta-percha.
He began a three year contract with the Gutta Percha Company. By 1850 Charles and his brother Walter established the West Ham Gutta Percha Company as a competitor to the Gutta Percha Company with which Charles had previously been engaged and established a manufactory in Stratford, which moved to more extensive premises in London the following year.
For the last 30 years of Charles' life he suffered from heart attacks. He died on 30 July 1877 at Blackheath.
The Gutta Percha Company was an English company formed in 1845 to make a variety of products from the recently introduced natural rubber gutta-percha. Unlike other natural rubbers, this material was thermoplastic allowing it to be easily moulded. Nothing else like it was available to manufacturing until well into the twentieth century when synthetic plastics were developed.[1]
Gutta-percha proved to be an ideal insulator for submarine telegraph cables. The company started making this type of cable in 1848 and it rapidly became their main product, on which it had a near monopoly. The world's first international telegraph connection under the sea, a link from Dover to Calais in 1851, used a cable made by the company. Except for a few early ones, submarine cables were armoured with iron, then later steel, wires.[2] The Gutta Percha Company made only the insulated cores, not the complete cable, until April 1864 when it merged into the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, which was later acquired by British Insulated Callender's Cables in 1959.[3]
Gutta-percha
Gutta-percha is a natural rubber that has the unusual property (for 19th-century materials) of being thermoplastic. It can be moulded after placing in hot water and will reharden when cool. It was brought to attention in Europe by William Montgomerie, a Scottish surgeon of the East India Company in Singapore where the trees from which the material is obtained are native. Montgomerie sent samples to the Society of Arts in London in 1843 with the idea that the material could be used for medical apparatus.[4]
In 1844, Montgomerie left samples with Charles Mackintosh's raincoat company. A partner in the company, Thomas Hancock, passed samples to his brother Charles who was trying to invent a new bottle stopper made from cemented ground cork. Hancock then abandoned his original idea and took out a patent for bottle stoppers made from gutta-percha.[5]