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Saturday, April 14, 2018

Wallace Carothers, the revolutionary inventor of nylon

Por Nina

In the last 100 years, plastics have come to dominate the material world. It seems that there really is a plastic for everything. They are so common; in fact, it's easy to forget that we're often even dressed in plastic. And it was in the 1940s that a fiber was introduced that would change the world of fashion forever: nylon.

Its invention offered elegance and practicality to women who were looking for an alternative to expensive and delicate silk stockings. But the impact of nylon soon went much further: it marked the beginning of a textile revolution for consumers and the military, ultimately helping the Allies win the Second World War.

The nylon was developed at the DuPont factory in the late 1930s by Wallace Carothers, a world-renowned organic chemist educated at Harvard and born in Burlington, Iowa in 1896. The synthetic materials were not completely new. But until the invention of nylon, no useful fiber had been synthesized completely in the laboratory. Semi-synthetics such as rayon and cellophane were derived from a chemical process that required wood pulp as the basic element. This implied that they could not modify the natural properties of the plant material at their discretion: rayon, for example, was too rigid and shiny to be adopted as a replacement for real silk. The nylon, on the other hand, was manufactured through the human manipulation of nothing but "coal, air and water", a mantra that its promoters never tired of repeating.

The introduction of this new plastic fabric to the public was in the form of a much desired product at that time. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the hems of the fashionable dresses of the ladies began to rise. Little by little, it was revealing more and more leg. What was needed was a cheap, elegant and transparent garment to cover the exposed skin. The nylon was ideal for knitting stockings, turning what had been a luxury item into something really much better than their expensive silk ancestors. They were durable, easy to wash and their appearance was attractive. They became an essential item. The stockings went to the US market on May 15, 1940, at US $ 1.15 per pair.

That year DuPont produced 2.6 million pounds of nylon, representing a total sales figure of US $ 9 million, about US $ 150 million in today's money. But in 1942, due to World War II, the stockings returned to be a luxury, because the production of nylon was destined to the manufacture of parachutes (previously made of silk). Nylon was also used to make glider tow lines, aircraft fuel tanks, bulletproof vests, shoelaces, mosquito nets, laces, hammocks and more. It was essential for the war effort, for what has been called "the fiber that won the war."

Synthetic fibers such as nylon are the epitome of our mastery of materials, our ability to invent and engineer new materials specific to our needs and use them to manufacture products that are affordable for the greatest number of people. For centuries, comfort was the exclusive domain of the rich, and that is because many of the objects that gave that comfort were handmade. That takes a long time and is expensive. The materials that can be mass produced allowed more people to have some comfort and luxury in their homes. The world of plastics has provided such a cornucopia of comforts that today it is difficult to imagine life without them.

The recognition of his great contribution to science was immediate. In 1936 he was named Academic of Sciences, an honor never before received by a chemist of his specialty. Of course, with the passage of time we have realized how damaging that plastic revolution has been. Now, we are in a race against time to reduce the use of these materials and with it the damage they cause to the environment. However, when Wallace Carothers' team created that first laboratory fiber, what they were looking for was a solution. Perhaps, the experience serves to highlight the importance of anticipating what can happen with materials that are being created, such as the celebrated graphene.

But its inventor, Wallace Carothers, did not live to see that success. He had a scientific career as brilliant as fleeting, more typical of a rock star or a tormented artist. Although by 1837 he had almost 50 patents to his name, he suffered from depression and that prevented him from witnessing the success of his first-hand inventions. Carothers often doubted his aptitude as a chemist and was devastated when his first prototypes of superpolymers failed. Carother's disease continued even after he and his team synthesized nylon successfully. Two years after the discovery, he took his own life drinking a cocktail of lemon juice and potassium cyanide in a hotel in Philadelphia.