The present Michelin Company dates back to 1829 when Édouard Daubrée marries a Scott, Elizabeth Pugh Barker niece of the scientist Charles Macintosh, who discovered the solubility of rubber in benzene.
The Daubrées family had created their fortune in trade – notably the sugar trade, which collapsed during the Napoleonic Wars with the crippling blockade against French shipping. He was soon joined by Aristide Barbier, a distant cousin and also a close friend.
Whatever else she brought to the marriage as dowry, Elizabeth Daubrée apparently was the niece – at any rate she had grown up in the shadow – of Charles Macintosh, the Scot who made rubber work for him at a time (1823) when inventors and entrepreneurs were looking for ways to manipulate the strange substance, and then to find practical uses for it. A little later, the miraculous process known as vulcanization – essentially the application of heat and sulphur to transform crude rubber into something at once stronger and more pliable – created an industry.
A decade and a half before this process was tried and proved successful, Macintosh had begun to strip off slices of crude rubber – hardened latex – to dissolve it in low-boiling naphtha, encasing it between layers of fabric to produce waterproof clothing material. By 1824 he was running a company bearing his name to make and sell his patented rainwear. Still later, his genial creation would be known universally as the ‘mackintosh’.
It was a rough moment in the Industrial Revolution. There was a race to be the first to file a patent, another race to be the first to exploit new and potentially profitable manufacturing processes. In 1839 Charles Goodyear first stumbled upon the vulcanization process that was to make all the difference, yet he had not had the business sense to nail down his patent in time. He even thought he could keep the discovery to himself while he negotiated its sale, letting samples get out of his hands, at which point a clever Englishman, Thomas Hancock, unravelled his secret by sniffing out the sulphur in it – and filed his own patent for vulcanization a year ahead of Goodyear’s (in 1843, to be precise). Goodyear fought back, threatening legal action if Europeans violated his rights. French rubber-makers who ignored Goodyear’s moral priority were taken to court, their defence led by none other than Aristide Barbier – armed with his legal background – and they won – in France at least; the year was 1854.
The original Barbier–Daubrée combination worked like a charm until the end, but the end always comes. They even died in harmony – Aristide Barbier in 1863 and Edouard Daubrée just a year later, having ensured the succession as best they could – given that Daubrée left two sons and widower Barbier two daughters. Of the Daubrée sons the elder, Ernest, already 34 years old at his father’s death, seemed to give the better guarantee that he could handle the succession. But now there was – or could be – a male pretender on the Barbier side. During the early years of the Clermont-Ferrand adventure Aristide’s daughters Emilie and Adèle had lived in Paris, raised by the sister of their long-departed mother. The story goes that when they were of the age to marry, the daughters had access to the best drawing rooms. But it was in Clermont-Ferrand that Aristide eventually found a man for Emilie, who by then was 24 years old. The prospective husband, a recent widower, son of a property lawyer, was himself a lawyer. And it was still further away from Paris – in Luz, a spa in the Pyrenees frequented by Aristide Barbier in his late and prosperous years – that his second daughter Adèle (then a ripe 21) was first seen in the company of a gentleman named Jules Michelin (a dozen years her senior).
Text taken from ( The Michelin Men - Driving an Empire, by I.B. Tauris)
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