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How the teenage immigrant inventor of Durex condoms was forgotten by history – In Depth Out Loud podcast

Historic card condom packets reading 'DUREX Gossamer' in purple.
© Private collection of Jessica Borge, 2018.,, Author provided

This episode of The Conversation’s In Depth Out Loud podcast features the story of Lucian Landau, the forgotten man who invented the technology that made Durex boom.

Jessica Borge, Digital Collections (Scholarship) Manager at King’s College London Archives and Research Collections and a Visiting Fellow in Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, explains her research into who actually invented Durex condoms.

She discovered that the technology behind Durex was invented by Lucian Landau, a Polish teenager living in Highbury and studying rubber technology at the former Northern Polytechnic (now London Metropolitan University). His story is fascinating.

You can read the text version of this in-depth article here. The audio version is read by Adrienne Walker in partnership with Noa, the audio journalism platform.

This story came out of a project at The Conversation called Insights, which is supported by Research England. You can read more stories in the series here.

The music in In Depth Out Loud is Night Caves, by Lee Rosevere.

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