Bradford People: the Moultons
Stephen Moulton (1794-1880) was the man who brought rubber production to Bradford on Avon. He was born in Whorlton, County Durham, but was living in New York in the 1840s when he met Charles Goodyear, who had discovered a method of vulcanising rubber -a process which turned rubber from a substance that was sticky when warm and brittle when cold into a...
Read MoreThe Iron Duke
Moves are afoot to bring the Iron Duke back to Bradford. It is a big calender machine that was used to roll sheet rubber and cotton together and vulcanise them to make waterproof fabric. This was the actual machine with which Stephen Moulton started the rubber works in Bradford in 1848 and is important not just in Bradford’s history, but in the history of technology.
It was...
Read MoreOld Photographs: The Rubber Works
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Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
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Views of the works of the Spencer Moulton rubber company’s Kingston Mills, mostly from just after the First World War.
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Read MoreThe Museum Collection: the Rubber Industry
Bradford on Avon was the birthplace of a pioneering rubber industry. In 1848 Stephen Moulton, an Englishman living in New York and a friend of Charles Goodyear, came back and set up a factory to apply Goodyear’s discovery of vulcanisation in the redundant Kingston Mill. Moulton merged with a London company later in the 19th century, becoming George...
Read MoreThe Rubber Industry
Apart from Macintosh in Glasgow, the rubber industry in this country began in Bradford in 1848 when Stephen Moulton brought Charles Goodyear’s process across from the USA.
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