A History of Linoleum

Holy linoleum, Batman! For most of civilization walking across a floor meant a cold hard surface made of wood. When rugs came along there was an outcry of thanks from those who could afford it more ear-shattering than what you would hear if Nancy Pelosi went missing and the new Speaker of the House immediately began impeachment proceeding against Bush, Cheney and Rice. And then in the middle of the 1800s there came an invention that revolutionized flooring. It was cheap enough for those who could not afford carpeting and it could be cleaned with an ease never before known in the history of brooms.

A Scottish chemist named Michael Narin accomplished what some of the greatest scientific minds in history had not been able to do. What Narin did was mix some oil-based paint with cork fibers. The result was something akin to what we know today as linoleum. There was only problem standing between Narin’s discovery and the end of spending an entire day cleaning the floor. The length of the process was far too long to produce his product. Enter another chemist named Elijah Galloway. Galloway essentially cooked some cork powder with rubber and the result was a hard, sticky form of linoleum that he called kamptulicon. So well-received was Galloway’s kamptulicon that it was used to lay down flooring in some rooms at Parliament. Kamptulicon’s reign was to be short-lived however, because it was also too costly and also because it was sometimes proved to be just a little too sticky.

It would take yet another Brit, named Frederick Walton to create what we today know as linoleum when he figured out a process of oxidizing linseed oil with resin and cork dust on a flax backing. But it would be an American, with a name you probably recognize, who would turn Walton’s invention into a money-making machine. Well, that’s what Americans have already done best: selling things that other people invent. Thomas Armstrong invested in a machine to produce cork stoppers for bottles of bubbly. Armstrong was a young man who recognized the value every dollar and it killed him to see all the cork powder produced by this process go to utter waste. Once he heard that a new market existed for all that powder, he jumped into action and invested in the new invention. It would be Thomas Armstrong who would transform what Walton has seen as merely a way to make life easier into a way to increase status. Walton’s original linoleum flooring had been drab and boring; Armstrong infused it with color and patterns and began advertising it as a way to not only make life easier by more beautiful. Families who had never known anything but bare wooden floors and a maybe a few cheap throw rugs gobbled up the new shiny floors by the millions of square feet.