Wallace Carothers

Wallace Carothers started college on a business track, training in accountancy and shorthand at a commercial college in Des Moines before switching to chemistry at tiny Tarkio College in Missouri, where he was teaching the subject before he had finished his own degree. He earned his bachelor's at twenty-four, a master's at Illinois in 1921, and a doctorate there in 1924, then taught organic chemistry at South Dakota, Illinois and finally Harvard, where by 1926 he had begun thinking seriously about long chains of repeating molecules — the polymers no American chemist had yet found a reliable way to build on purpose.

DuPont hired him in 1928 to run industrial research with the freedom of a university lab, and he took the job despite warning his new employer that he suffered spells of what he called diminished capacity. It worked spectacularly at first: in 1930 a chemist working under him isolated chloroprene and polymerized it into neoprene, the first synthetic rubber. Four years later his group turned to polyamides, and on February 28, 1935, Gerard Berchet produced the polymer that became nylon. Carothers worked out the mathematics describing how such chains grow, patented the underlying process, and gave DuPont a fiber strong enough to replace silk. Nylon stockings went on public sale in 1940 and sold out within days. Carothers never saw either breakthrough reach a store shelf.

The depression that shadowed him from youth deepened as the work succeeded. He vanished from the lab in the summer of 1934 and was found consulting a psychiatrist at a Baltimore clinic; two years later he was involuntarily committed to a Philadelphia hospital, and his own doctor came to believe suicide was the likely end of the case. A years-long affair with a married woman strained his family even after his 1936 marriage to Helen Sweetman, herself a DuPont chemist. His sister Isobel died of pneumonia in January 1937; Carothers attended the funeral in Des Moines. Three months later, alone in a Philadelphia hotel room, he dissolved potassium cyanide in a squeezed lemon and drank it. He left no note, at forty — and DuPont did not announce nylon to the world until sixteen months after he was dead.

His daughter Jane was born seven months after his death. DuPont unveiled nylon publicly in October 1938, stockings went on sale in 1940, and wartime demand soon diverted nearly all production into parachute cloth and rope. The company built an industry worth billions on Carothers's patents and rarely spoke of how he had died; for decades the invention was credited to "DuPont" more than to the man behind it. He had already been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1936, the first industrial organic chemist to receive that honor, and his name is still attached to the mathematics of polymer growth that chemistry students learn as the Carothers equation.

Wallace Carothers's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Neoprene invention
  The first synthetic rubber, developed under his direction by Arnold Collins 1930
• Nylon (polyamide 6-6) invention
  Produced February 28, 1935, by Gerard Berchet in his laboratory 1935
• Linear Condensation Polymers patent
  U.S. Patent 2,071,250, the foundational patent for polyamide fibers 1937
• The Carothers equation discovery
  Describes the relationship between molecular weight and conversion in step-growth polymerization 1936

• April 27, 1896 aged 0 Born in Burlington, Iowa
• 1920 aged ~24 Earns a BS in chemistry from Tarkio College at 24
• 1924 aged ~28 Earns a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois
• February 6, 1928 aged 31 Joins DuPont's Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware
• April 1930 aged 33 His group isolates chloroprene and polymerizes it into neoprene
• February 28, 1935 aged 38 Gerard Berchet produces the polymer that becomes nylon
• June 1936 aged 40 Involuntarily committed to a Philadelphia psychiatric hospital
• April 29, 1937 aged 41 Dies by cyanide poisoning in a Philadelphia hotel room
• October 27, 1938 aged 42 DuPont publicly announces nylon, sixteen months after his death

• Stephanie Kwolek 1923–2014
  Invented Kevlar aramid fiber while working as a DuPont research chemist. successor in DuPont polymer research
• Charles Goodyear 1800–1860
  Self-taught chemist who discovered the vulcanization process that made rubber commercially viable. predecessor in rubber chemistry