The and Wonderful Evolution of the Waterproof Jacket
carryology.com
carryology.com
I also have a lighter weight Ventile raincoat by Private White VC that is absolutely phenomenal. I wish more brands would adopt it and democratize the fabric.
Until the goretex delaminates and becomes impossible to repair, of course.
Seriously, people are looking for reasons to get offended. Have you read anything written between 1990 and 2023? Plenty of people talk and write like this. Your post adds nothing to this discussion.
https://www.carryology.com/contributor/michael-knispel/
but who knows
World War II did what it always does to materials technology: it accelerated it by decades.
Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII .. which is seemingly something that can be applied many times .. just add a dash of WWII to your tech.
The first is that the governments were willing to allocate vast amounts of money and resources for the development of new materials that would give them advantages over the opponents.
During normal market conditions, it would have been impossible to secure so much money for research whose results were uncertain to generate financial profits.
The second reason is that during wars the global commerce routes were perturbed, so many materials that normally were cheap and easily available became expensive or impossible to procure, which could block the production or the usage of certain kinds of weapons and military equipment.
Therefore it became necessary to find substitute materials, which was the origin of many research projects, e.g. nylon instead of silk, synthetic elastomers instead of natural rubber, synthetic gasoline instead of gasoline extracted from fossil oil and so on.
The premise was never unclear, the complaint is about sentence structure.
Assuming you actually put time into what you wrote would be the less charitable interpretation.
The reply did not miss the point, it was addressing a question directly posed in the original comment.
By taking the question seriously, you and the person I replied to both have missed the point.
for many speakers of English as a first language seeped in the conventions of English conversation, storytelling, and literature it was a clear juxtaposition intended to single out the ridiculous proposition that technology advances during wartime are somehow tied to WWII alone.
Have a look at the original sentence again, it's absolutely a clunker, very probably the product of a clanker (or of an ESL human).
Even more, googling the history of waterproof garments, I found a variety of product catalogues and a museum brochure [2] that gave a "history" similar to the article. My guess is these are shallow histories of products (Mackintosh, Gortex, etc) and they all copied each other (manually) and then AI copied the narrative (automatically).
But more than copying the narrative, the article tries to make this haphazard narrative into something more systematic. But there is where the rhetorical structure actually starts to strain.
And the last paragraph about waxed coats is distinctly bizarre: "The waxed cotton coat was not a technical solution. It was a cultural one, a garment that said something about who you were and how you spent your time, that happened to keep you reasonably dry while you were doing it. " In late 19th century Britain, the class system didn't involve anyone signally that they spent time fishing in an open boat (maybe 2020's US has wealthy MAGA type who want to impersonate rawboned sons of toil but that can't be project view back to the past).
And yes, the prose is more jarring the more closely you read the text.
And jeesh, tearing apart a text that was likely automatically generated in the blink of an eye might show defense beats offense these day (and damn, it's hard to avoid these AIism myself). But at least it gives insight into crazy stuff that can even reach the top of hn.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raincoat
[2] https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/textiles-and-fashion/a-very-brief...
Eh? Typo? Why move away from GoreTex if the new jackets are worse?
As a big user of GoreTex, I’m hoping you meant to say the new jackets are better.
Gore-Tex these days is not made out of Teflon itself (as the fine article talks about) and its replacement is fine. As the article also points out the patent has been expired for some time and replacements have cropped up. The direct replacements are all fine too.
But without a DWR that works really well, you never have the right conditions to allow water vapor to escape from inside the jacket. Again as the article points out Gore-Tex performs well in the lab, which does not transfer to real world conditions.
So you have a problem where GoreTex kind of just acts like a much cheaper material, at a much greater expense. For those situations (most) you may as well just use a simpler, impermeable material (siliconed-coated nylon, for example) and vent it mechanically (open up a zipper).
The exception is actual alpine conditions, where precipitation is falling as something frozen (snow). There's really no need for the DWR to work perfectly to bead up the water on the surface, as it's not actually liquid.
But even then, much of a layer system for conditions is about control how much moisture you trap within your clothing. You climb a mountain, you sweat. What are you gunna do about it? Wearing a waterproof jacket is sometimes not what you wanna do at all, to keep your layers as dry as possible, and only put the jacket on when conditions require it (it's snowing, or it's so cold you need to trap the warmth in, even though that traps perspiration in too).
And if you don't like PFAS and forever chemicals, you're not going to like microplastics, the majority of which are from rubber car and truck tires. Electric cars -- being heavier -- wear out tires faster and are more of a problem in this respect. We don't talk about this much because we can't live in a world without cars.
I would agree that even with the delicateness of Shakedry, or Shakedry-like product, there would still a use case and market.
I think Columbia’s OutDry Extreme tech is essentially the same thing with the membrane on the outside, which they claim is toughened to withstand abrasion, so maybe holds up better than ShakeDry:
https://www.columbia.com/meet-outdry-extreme.html
I haven’t tried it myself but I found it while researching this topic recently
see: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20title%20automatic&type=...
People over-emphasize the staying dry part, not understanding that the point of staying dry is usually to stay warm. If it's hot outside, staying dry is not that important.
“Think of it like this. Imagine you have a room full of people on one side of a door, and an empty room on the other side. Open the door and people will naturally drift toward the empty room. That’s how Gore-Tex breathes.”