Tower and Town, June 2015

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Charles Hancock: Painting, Gutta-Percha, Electric Telegraph

Charles was the youngest of the brothers and apprenticed to a painter in London. At the age of 17 he had pictures hung in the Royal Academy summer exhibition. Throughout his life he was a respected and financially successful painter, increasingly featuring animals and especially successful racehorses. His pictures are still collected today.

However, he also had scientific/commercial interests and early on went into business with Walter. The two were given a patent by brother Thomas in 1823 for a ship's anti-fouling paint made from gutta-percha. Gutta-percha is a latex similar to rubber and is collected from the sap of trees in Malaya and India. At room temperature it is a pliable solid easily formed into objects like knife handles. He and Walter were young and naive however and their chosen partners quickly stripped them of both the patent and their money so he returned to painting, taking rooms in Reading and doing private commissions. But he also invented and sold 'Hancock's Scentless Water Colours' and 'Hancock's Scentless Oil.' By 1826 he had moved to Norwich taking a room at Tattershall's, the better to paint turf and sporting subjects. Better at spending than getting, however, he still needed to borrow £40 from the Ward and Merriman Bank in Marlborough.

Around this time 'gutta-percha' was being introduced into the UK from Malaya. Like rubber it was a tree sap, but differed in molecular structure and was a solid at normal temperatures. Charles, like Thomas, and Walter was a member of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) where their friend Michael Faraday suggested gutta-percha might be a good material for insulating telegraph wires. Charles was finding portraiture less lucrative than he had hoped and was working with Walter to invent a gutta-percha artificial bottle cork, and founded the Gutta Percha Company off the City Road in London making chamber utensils. But then Charles, who seems to have had little compunction about double crossing his siblings or business partners, patented a machine to insulate telegraph wires without telling them. In the furore he lost this company and with Walter set up the West Ham Gutta Percha Company in competition, but this quickly went bankrupt. The patents and the stock were bought by Mr Samuel Winkworth Silver (who gave his name to Silvertown in the Isle of Dogs) who formed 'The Indiarubber, Gutta Percha & Telegraph Cable Works.' Meanwhile the original company supplied the cable for the 1850 and 1851 cross-Channel and the 1858 trans-Atlantic telegraphs.

Alexander Kirk Wilson