Scientist of the Day - Wallace Carothers
Wallace Carothers with Neoprene, photograph, 1932, Hagley Museum and Library (hagley.org)
Wallace Hume Carothers, an American organic chemist, died Apr. 29, 1937. He was born on Apr. 27, 1896, in Burlington, Iowa, and attended the now-defunct Tarkio College in the northwest corner of Missouri, where he studied chemistry. He did graduate work at the University of Illinois. Carothers was a brilliant chemist and he had no problem finding academic positions, including at Harvard, which is where DuPont found him and plucked him into the ranks of industry.
The Dupont Experimental Station at Wilmington, Del., where Wallace Carothers worked and invented nylon, 1928-37, Hagley Museum and Library (hagley.org)
DuPont decided in 1927 to set up a pure research department, with no attention to practical applications (at least, not at first). Their Experimental Station was based in Wilmington, Delaware (second image). Carothers was recruited successfully by offering him a salary twice as large as he was getting at Harvard, and he was told he would be given a research team and could do whatever he wanted. Carothers was reluctant at first, because he suffered bouts of depression, and he thought that was more easily tolerated in academia than in industry. But he took the Job in 1928.
Carothers chose polymer research as his project, wanting to create the largest molecule ever. One of his team's early successes was the first synthetic rubber, neoprene. In his quest for long molecules, Carothers switched from polyesters to polyamides, and by 1935, he had found a way to make a synthetic plastic that could be drawn out into very thin and strong fibers. The material would later be called nylon.
Wallace Carothers’ laboratory at the Dupont Experimental Station, Hagley Museum and Library (digital.hagley.org)
Unfortunately, Carothers’ bouts with depression intensified. At one point in 1935, he simply disappeared and no one could find him for months, before he was discovered in a Baltimore psychiatric clinic, where he had apparently committed himself.
Carothers married a fellow DuPont worker in 1936, after a years-long affair with a married woman, but the fits of depression continued. He was removed from the nylon project but kept on at DuPont, even though he had ceased to be productive. Soon after his marriage, he was committed against his will to a psychiatric hospital In Philadelphia, where he was under the direct supervision of an excellent psychiatrist, who however had no success in curing or even coping with Carothers’ depression.
DuPont, meanwhile, found a way to mass-produce nylon, and they announced the new product in 1938. They decided to focus initially on something that would be newspaper splashy, which turned out to be nylon stockings for women, which DuPont showcased at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Nylons sold out everywhere they were offered, millions of pairs. Unfortunately, when the U.S. entered the War, nylon production was immediately diverted to the production of parachutes and cords, so the boom in nylon stockings was put on hold for four years, before it was allowed to resume, as vigorous as ever.
Tombstone of Wallace Carothers, Glendale Cemetery, Des Moines, Iowa; the family name “Carothers” is on a separate stone (findagrave.com)
Carothers, however, saw none of this. Even though he had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1936, the first industrial organic chemist so honored, he could not pull himself out of his depression. On the night of Apr. 28/29, 1937, he took cyanide in his hotel room, and was found dead in the morning. He was 41 years old. He was buried in the Carothers family plot in Des Moines (fourth image). heis no menion of nylon on his tombstone, probably because nylon was still just a dream when he died.
Dust jacket, Enough for One Lifetime: Wallace Carothers, Inventor of Nylon, by Matthew E. Hermes, American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1996; our Library has the book but not the dust jacket (amazon.co.uk)
There is a biography of Carothers, published in 1996, Enough for One Lifetime: Wallace Carothers, Inventor of Nylon, by Matthew E. Hermes, which was the primary source for this post. It is a sad read.
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
