Wallace Carothers
Wallace Hume Carothers (April 27, 1896 – April 29, 1937) in Burlington, Iowa. He was an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont and is credited with the invention of Nylon.[1]
Biography
Wallace Carothers was a group leader in DuPont’s Experimental Station laboratory, near Wilmington, Delaware, where most polymer research was done.[2]
Carothers was born in Burlington Iowa in 1896. He was the oldest of four children. He had one brother and two sisters: John, Isobel, and Mary. As a youth Carothers was fascinated by tools and mechanical devices and spent many hours experimenting. Carothers was a brilliant organic chemist who helped lay the groundwork for neoprene and is considered the inventor of nylon. After receiving his PhD, he taught at several universities before he was hired by the du Pont Company to work on fundamental research.
He married the former Helen Sweetman on February 21,1936. Carothers had frequent bouts of depression, which led him to commit suicide on April 29,1937. His daughter, Jane, was born seven months later (November 27, 1937).
Carothers attended public school in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was known as a conscientious student. After graduation he enrolled in the Capital City Commercial College in Des Moines, where his father, Ira, was Vice-President, completing the accountancy and secretarial curriculum in July 1915. Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).
He was brought to DuPont after colleagues from University of Illinois and Harvard University recommended him as the most brilliant organic chemist they knew. Carothers started a program to understand the chemistry of natural polymers and to make synthetic versions of them. By 1934 much had been discovered about the area but no success with making an artificial silk.
His colleague, Julian Hill, discovered that cold-drawing polyesters and nylons changed their properties and made nylon a useful material. DuPont never patented nylon, but patented the process of cold-drawing it.
Wallace Carothers had been troubled by periods of mental depression since his youth. Despite his success with nylon, he felt that he had not accomplished much and had ran out of ideas. His unhappiness was compounded by the death of his favorite sister, and on the 29th of April 1937, he checked into a Philadelphia hotel room and died after drinking a cocktail of lemon juice laced with potassium cyanide.[3]
References
- ^ Hermes, Matthew. Enough for One Lifetime, Wallace Carothers the Inventor of Nylon, Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1996, ISBN 0-8412-3331-4.
- ^ Roberts, RM (1989) Serendipity: Accidental discoveries In Science, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-60203-5
- ^ Burton, Holman, Lazonby, Pilling & Waddington, Chemical Storylines, Heinemann Educational Publishers, 2000. ISBN 0-435-63119-5
External links
- DuPont Inventor Wallace Carothers Featured in Chronicles of Chemistry Magazine
- Chemical achievers at chemheritage.org
Patents
- U.S. patent 1,995,291 "Alkylene Carbonate and Process of Making It", filed November 1929, issued March 1935
- U.S. patent 2,012,267 "Alkylene Ester of Polybasic Acids", filed August 1929, issued August 1935
- U.S. patent 2,071,250 "Linear Condensation Polymers", filed July 1931, issued February 1937
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