A short history of the umbrella
Few possessions are treated as carelessly as the umbrella. It is left on trains by the thousand, lent and never returned, and abandoned in the street at the first broken rib. Yet this humble object has a history stretching back more than three thousand years, and for most of that time it had nothing whatever to do with rain. The word itself comes from the Latin umbra, meaning 'shade'.
Stone carvings from ancient Egypt and Assyria show servants holding a canopy on a pole above the head of a king. The device kept off the sun, but its real purpose was to display rank: to be shaded by an umbrella was the privilege of rulers. Similar customs existed in China, and it was the Chinese who took the step that would eventually change the umbrella's function. By coating the paper cover with wax and lacquer, they produced the first umbrellas capable of keeping out water.
The Greeks and Romans adopted the sunshade from the East, but in their hands it became an article of female fashion. A man who carried one was laughed at as weak, and this attitude proved remarkably long-lived. After the collapse of the Roman Empire the umbrella almost disappeared from Europe for a thousand years, surviving chiefly in the ceremonies of the Church.
It returned by way of Italy in the sixteenth century and spread to France, where by the early 1700s it was a familiar sight in the hands of Parisian women. In rainy England its usefulness might have seemed obvious, yet men refused to adopt it. A gentleman was expected to keep a carriage, and to be seen with an umbrella was to confess that he could not afford one. The person usually credited with changing this is Jonas Hanway, a traveller and writer on social questions who had seen umbrellas in use in Persia. From about 1750, and for the next thirty years, he carried one through the streets of London whenever it rained. Passers-by jeered at him, and the drivers of hired coaches, whose trade depended on wet weather, were openly hostile. By the time Hanway died in 1786, however, other men had begun to follow his example, and for some years umbrellas were popularly known as 'Hanways'.
The umbrellas of that period were clumsy objects. Their frames were made of wood or whalebone and their covers of oiled cloth, which became extremely heavy when wet and took a long time to dry. The decisive improvement came in 1852, when Samuel Fox, who manufactured steel wire in the north of England, designed a rib of thin steel that was U-shaped in cross-section. The form gave great strength for very little weight. Fox's frame made the umbrella slimmer, more reliable and cheaper, and the standard umbrella sold today differs from his in few important respects.
The next significant advance was made in Germany. Hans Haupt, an engineer, walked with a stick as the result of a wartime injury and found that he could not conveniently manage an umbrella as well. In 1928 he devised a telescopic frame that collapsed to a length short enough to be carried in a pocket. It was sold under the name 'Knirps', a German word meaning 'little fellow', and was soon being copied around the world.
Today the great majority of the world's umbrellas are produced in China, where a single city in the east of the country contains more than a thousand factories devoted to them. Mass production has made the umbrella so cheap that it is often regarded as disposable. Many last no longer than a single storm, and because each one is constructed from mixed materials, with metal, plastic and fabric fixed tightly together, they are very difficult to recycle.
Inventors, meanwhile, have never stopped trying to improve on the basic design, and patent offices hold thousands of proposals. The fault that most of them attempt to cure is the umbrella's habit of turning inside out in a strong wind. One of the more successful answers came from a design student in the Netherlands, who abandoned the traditional circular canopy for an asymmetrical one. Like a weathervane, it swings round to find the position in which the wind has least effect on it, and it is claimed to survive gales that would wreck an ordinary umbrella. Even so, the object that most people reach for on a wet morning is one that Samuel Fox would recognise immediately.