Wallace Carothers (1896-1937) was an excellent chemist and, as an undergraduate, was made head of the chemistry department at Tarkio College, Missouri. After becoming a professor at Harvard, he was lured into industry by chemical company DuPont, which had opened a science laboratory to develop new products.
In 1928 he headed up a team looking into artificial materials. Carothers was interested in the hydrocarbon acetylene and its family of chemicals. After having developed the first synthetic rubber polymer—mass produced by DuPont as neoprene in 1931—he looked into creating a man-made synthetic fiber that could replace silk. Japan was the United States's main source of silk, but trade relations were breaking down as the political situation between the two countries worsened. Silk was becoming harder to source and very expensive.
In 1935, Carothers made significant steps toward a silklike fiber by developing a chemical reaction between chemical units called monomers. The reaction resulted in a polymeric fiber and generated water as a by-product. If the water was removed from the reaction as it formed, then an even stronger fiber resulted. This fiber is now known as nylon and was introduced to the world in 1938. During the war it replaced silk in the manufacture of parachutes, and it subsequently found a huge and lucrative market in nylon stockings. Nylon now underpins the multi- billion-dollartextile industry.
The highly ambitious Carothers suffered from severe depression and, in April 1937, despairing that he had no fresh inspiration, he committed suicide by taking a dose of potassium cyanide.
