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Posted February 15, 2007
Wallace Hume Carothers, who changed the world with the invention of fabric and neoprene, was born in Burlington and grew up in Des Moines. His invention, patented by the DuPont Corporation on Feb. 16, 1937, came at a time when Japan was limited the amount of natural fibers Japan was sending to the United States because of growing political strife between the two countries. Today, the synthetic fiber is found in a variety of products.
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Wallace Carothers, father of nylon
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Carothers was born in Burlington in 1896 and moved to Des Moines with his family when he turned three. The eldest of four children, he enjoyed working with tools and spent much of his childhood with his nose buried in a book. He had eclectic tastes in literature, from Gulliver’s Travels to Mark Twain to biographies of Thomas Edison. In high school, his thirst for knowledge led him to the chemistry lab, where friends labeled him “the professor.” Carothers was also passionate about classical music and said later in life that if he were to start over again, he would devote his life to music.
Carothers continued to excel academically in college. After graduating high school in Des Moines, he enrolled in Tarkio College in Missouri where he studied accounting and then chemistry. Financial problems
lead him into temporarily teaching accounting in college, but he remained interested in chemistry and became head of the chemistry department at Tarkio while still and undergraduate, due in part to a shortage of teachers because of World War I. He eventually migrated to the University of Illinois, where he received both a Master’s and Ph.D. He becamse a professor at Harvard in 1924 and started his research into chemical structures of polymers.
Carothers, a moody and sullen man, found some happiness amongst the rows of test tubes in a laboratory and quit teaching in 1928, at the age of 32, to take a job in the new research laboratory for DuPont chemical company. The lab was charged with the development of artificial materials. One of his first projects was a study of a chemical group known as acetylene polymers. Through a lack of knowledge of polymer molecules existed when he began his work, an exploration into acetylene polymers led to the development of neoprene. In 1931, it was manufactured as synthetic rubber, widely used today in such products as gasoline and oil hose, garden hose, insulated wire, and gloves.
Then, Carothers' research team concentrated their attention towards a synthetic fiber that could be spun strong and could replace silk, which was in limited supply from Japan. Carothers believed that certain polymers could be produced by removing water from certain materials. On February 28, 1935, he made a resin from adipic acid and hexamethylene diamine.
Carothers had a habit of numbering his specimens. His numbering system characterized the superpolymers by the number of atoms of carbon that were contained in the diacids and diamines. He had over 100 different specimens that he was working on. In 1935 his specimen number 66 was selected by another team of scientists for study. Since both components contained six carbon atoms, the product named nylon was characterized by the number sixty-six.
During his nine years with DuPont, Wallace Carothers wrote 62 technical papers and filed 69 patents. He also was named as an associate editor of the American Chemical Society, a nonpaying position. His job was to examine potential publications for errors of fact, procedure, good chemical sense, and clear usage. He evaluated an astonishing 34 papers with long letters of careful criticisms.
Known only as 'Tiber 66" until September 1938, when it was first used in toothbrushes. Nylon made its first big break on May 15, 1940 when women’s hosiery hit the store shelves across the country. The hosiery sold for $1.15-$1.35 a pair and 5 million pairs were sold on the first day of sales. In the absence of Japanese silk during World War II, nylon parachutes were produced, along with airplane-fire cord, combat clothing, netting and hammocks for the jungle, and life rafts.
Nylon, the first successful synthetic fiber, became as familiar to the world as wool, silk, wood, or steel. Wallace Hume Carothers died too early to see the impact his invention would have on industry and everyday life. He was devoted to his sister, Isobel, a radio performer, and was never able to reconcile himself to her death in January 1936. He became obsessed with the thought that his life's work was meaningless.
Battling with fits of depression, he took his own life April 29, 1937, two days after his forty-first birthday by ingesting poison cyanide. He was survived by his widow, Helen Sweetman, and a daughter, Jane, who was born after his death.
In 1936, Carothers was elected to National Academy of Sciences. He was the only organic chemist outside of academic circles to receive this honor. Many years after his death he was honored again with a research laboratory at Du Pont named after him.
Wallace Carothers