His father was a cabinet maker and it is possible that Thomas Hancock was trained in the same trade: in 1815 he is recorded as being in partnership with his brother, Walter, in London, as a coach builder.
Hancock's interest in rubber seems to have sprung from a desire to make waterproof fabrics to protect the passengers on his coaches.
In 1820 he patented fastenings for gloves, suspenders, shoes and stockings; in the process of creating these early elastic fabrics, Hancock found himself wasting large amounts of rubber.
The two inventors merged their companies and began more fully co-operating, constructing, for example, an automatic spreading machine to replace the paint brushes previously used by Macintosh.
He mentioned in his "Personal Narrative" that his friend William Brockedon invented the word vulcanisation from the god Vulcan of Roman mythology.
Alexander Parkes, inventor of the "cold cure" process (vulcanisation of fabrics using sulphur chloride in a carbon disulphide solution), claimed that both Hancock and Brockendon admitted to him that their experiments on the Goodyear samples had enabled them to understand what he had done.
In 1857 Hancock published the story of his life's work as "The Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or India-Rubber Industry in England".