This led Carothers to foresee the possibility of making artificial fibers from linear-condensation superpolymers. In April 1930, his co-worker Julian Hill observed that a superpolyester could be mechanically drawn out from a melt or dry-spun from a solution into fibers or threads. This success was soon followed by the discovery of the “cold-drawing” phenomenon peculiar to these materials. Overcoming technical difficulties, his group was able to synthesize what he called “superpolymers,” polymers with molecular weights of ten thousand or more. If the products exhibited properties (such as elasticity and fibrousness) similar to natural polymers, then Staudinger’s claim that polymers were composed of macromolecules would be supported. He did not intend to produce a synthetic fiber when he started working at DuPont what he intended was simply to make molecules as large as he could in order to examine the properties of the products. By the time he joined DuPont in early 1928, Carothers had already developed his ideas into a coherent program for the synthesis of macromolecules by the use of established condensation reactions such as esterification. The unsettled German debate over the existence of macromolecules appealed to Carothers’s theoretical interest. Since the early 1920s, Staudinger had proposed the theory that polymers, such as rubber, cellulose, resins, and proteins, were made up of very large molecules, what he called “macromolecules.” His theory was severely criticized by many chemists, who claimed that polymers were the aggregates of relatively small molecules. Had it not been for the DuPont job offer, it is unlikely that the young Harvard instructor would have set out on a journey into the frontier of polymer research.Ĭarothers had been reading recent German articles on the structure of polymers by Hermann Staudinger and his opponents. Carothers chose polymers and polymerization as his new research subject because of the need for theoretical exploration as well as the vast commercial implications of polymers. In the spring of 1927, when DuPont approached Carothers to offer him a position in its newly established fundamental research program in Wilmington, Delaware, the company promised to leave the selection of research subject entirely to him. The synthetic-chemical approach and industrial orientation of Roger Adams at the University of Illinois also exerted a profound influence on Carothers’s style in chemistry and his career.īefore moving to the DuPont Company, Carothers had neither published nor performed any experiment in the field of polymers. While at Tarkio College in Missouri, Carothers decided on chemistry as his life’s work, largely at the encouragement of his chemistry teacher, Arthur M. Duncan’s popular books, The New Knowledge: A Popular Account of the New Physics and the New Chemistry in Their Relation to the New Theory of Matter (1905), an exposition of recent theories of matter, and The Chemistry of Commerce: A Simple Interpretation of Some New Chemistry in Its Relation to Modern Industry (1907), which stressed the importance of pure science for industry. When Carothers was a high school student in Des Moines, Iowa, his early interest in chemistry began with his reading of Robert K. Since the mid-1980s, a number of in-depth studies on Carothers, based on a large quantity of manuscripts, letters, and documents, have revealed some important aspects of his scientific career and work, such as his early encounter with chemistry, the origins of his polymer research, the process of his invention of nylon, and the industrial context in which Carothers worked on polymers.Įarly Years. For the original article on Carothers see DSB, vol. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 29 April 1937), chemistry, organic chemistry, polymer chemistry.
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