Linoleum

Carpets have been used for insulation as wall hangings for a very long time. The Greeks and Romans used flat, smooth, and large stones as floor coverings. Eastern Chinese nomads and the Mongolians kept portable rugs with them to double as bedrolls. The French made nice carpets and excelled at the weaving of them so France was the capital for the carpet trade until the french revolution, since most carpet weavers worked for the royalty they fled to other countries which balanced the carpet industry out. In north America wood was very plentiful so wood flooring coverings were most common until the discovery of rubber. A little while after the discovery of rubber a man decided to use it as a floor covering because water and mud would not soak into it and therefore it was very easy to clean. So it became a common floor covering with one drawback, it was very hard to decorate. So it was just a gray rubber on your floor. A while after this a man named Frederick Walton found that linseed oil that’s used as a binder in paint dries into a flexible rubber like materiel. He then found the fastest and best quality producing process for making it as a floor covering. His material was just like rubber in that it was very easy to clean but different in that it was easily decorateable. Walton’s first 5 years were unprofitable so he decided to make 2 shops in London where he would have demonstrations of cleaning it and people can see different designs and after that his linoleum flooring was the most popular until the 1950s.