Wallace Carothers

By Emre Yıldırım

Wallace Hume Carothers was born April 27, 1896, in Burlington, Iowa, and in nine years at DuPont he changed what clothes — and machines — are made of. A brilliant, depressive organic chemist, Carothers taught at Harvard before DuPont lured him in 1928 to head its new fundamental research program in Wilmington, Delaware, with an extraordinary brief: do pure science, publish freely, and see what comes of it.

What came of it was polymer science itself. Carothers worked out the theory of condensation polymerization — how small molecules link into giant chains — and then set his team to making the chains real. The first triumph was neoprene (1930): a synthetic rubber born from the acetylene chemistry of Julius Nieuwland, resistant to oil and weather, which became the standard material for wetsuits, hoses, and gaskets. The second was the miracle fiber. After years of dead ends, in 1935 his team pulled a molten blob of polyamide with a glass rod and watched it draw into a long, strong, silky thread — "fiber 66." It was stronger than silk, immune to moths, and could be made from coal, air, and water.

DuPont announced nylon on October 27, 1938. The first products — toothbrush bristles, then women's stockings in 1940 — sold out instantly; during the war, nylon went to parachutes, ropes, and tires. Carothers did not live to see it. Plagued by depression, he took his own life on April 29, 1937, in Philadelphia, at forty-one. He never knew that his fiber would clothe the world — or that polymer chemistry, the field he founded, would become one of the great sciences of the century.

DuPont's gamble on Carothers was unprecedented. In 1928 the company offered the Harvard instructor double his salary to lead pure research with no product mandate — publish everything, chase curiosity. Carothers built a team of young PhDs and started with theory: his 1929 papers on condensation polymerization gave the field its mathematical backbone. The practice followed fast. Neoprene — announced in 1930, commercialized as Duprene in 1931 — came from polymerizing chloroprene, itself derived from Julius Nieuwland's acetylene work at Notre Dame. Then the long hunt for a super-fiber: polyesters first, which melted too easily, until the spring of 1934, when Julian Hill pulled a molten polyamide sample with a glass rod and it drew into a cold-drawable filament — strong, elastic, silk-like. "Polymer 66," from hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid, each with six carbons, became nylon. DuPont kept it secret for four years while scaling production. Carothers, meanwhile, was unraveling: the death of his sister, his own deepening depression, and a dread that his work served commerce rather than truth. On April 29, 1937, in a Philadelphia hotel room, he took potassium cyanide. He was forty-one. Nylon stockings debuted two years later; he never saw a single pair.

Impact on civilization

Nylon proved that the most intimate materials of daily life could be synthesized. Before Carothers, textiles meant what farms and silkworms produced — cotton, wool, silk, all hostage to weather, pests, and empire; after him, fibers could be engineered molecule by molecule for strength, elasticity, and cost. The synthetic-fiber industry clothed billions cheaply, freed agriculture from fiber demand, and supplied the high-performance materials of the modern world: tire cord, parachutes, ropes, carpets, composites. Neoprene gave industry a rubber that oil could not dissolve. Together they completed the plastic century Baekeland had opened — proof that chemistry could redesign not just the objects around us, but the very fabric we wear against our skin.

Synthetics clothed the war and the peace that followed: parachutes that had been silk became nylon, ropes that had been hemp became nylon, and after 1945 the new fibers — polyester, acrylic, spandex — dressed the postwar consumer boom. The modern wardrobe is a petrochemical product, and its chemistry was worked out in Carothers's Wilmington laboratory.