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Biography of Wallace Hume CarothersName: Wallace Hume CarothersBirth Date: April 27, 1896 Death Date: 1937 Place of Birth: Burlington, Iowa, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: chemist Wallace Hume Carothers The American chemist Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) was an experimentalist in the organic and industrial branches. His researches into polymerization led to the invention of nylon, the first truly synthetic fiber.Artificial fibers, in the sense of being man-made, had been known since the closing decades of the 19th century; the first patents for processes resulting in fibers of the type later known as rayon were taken out as early as 1885. Once it had been discovered by x-ray analysis that natural fibers were composed of molecules that were themselves long and narrow, the possibility of building up such long molecules from small units, so producing new fibers, had been envisaged. Wallace Carothers, who more than anyone enabled this possibility to be realized, died the year before the creation of nylon was announced by E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, whose research team he had led with such distinction.Carothers …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…the National Academy of Sciences in 1936. He suffered from periodic fits of depression, which steadily grew worse; during one of these he ended his own life. Further Reading Roger Adams wrote a short biography of Carothers which was published in the National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, vol. 20 (1939); this biography, slightly shortened and lacking the bibliography of Carothers's papers, is reprinted in Eduard Farber, ed., Great Chemists (1961). The development of synthetic rubbers and fibers, including the work of Carothers, is discussed in John Jewkes, David Sawers, and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (1958), and in James G. Raitt, Modern Chemistry: Applied and Social Aspects (1966); both books give useful references for further reading. For a history of chemistry which includes the work of Carothers see Aaron J. Ihde, The Development of Modern Chemistry (1964).Hermes, Matthew E., Enough for one lifetime: Wallace Carothers, inventor of nylon, Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1996. |