Carothers. Wallace Hume

John R. Johnson. Carothers, Wallace Hume. Dictionary of American Biography. Supplement 2 (1958) 96-97. 

Carothers, Wallace Hume (1896-1937) American industrial chemist working for the Du Pont Company at Wilmington, Delaware, who invented nylon after producing the first successful synthetic rubber, neoprene. 

H. Mark and G. S. Whiby, eds.. Collected Papers of Wallace Hume Carothers on High Polymeric Substances, High Polymers, Vol. I, Interscience Pubhshers, New York, 1940. 

Leaving aside rayon and artificial silks generally, the first really effective polymeric textile fibre was nylon, discovered by the chemist Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) in the Du Pont research laboratories in America in 1935, and first put into production in 1940, just in time to make parachutes for the wartime forces. This was the first of several major commodity polymer fibres and, together with high-density polyethylene introduced about the same time and Terylene , polyethylene tereph-thalate, introduced in 1941 (the American version is Dacron), transformed the place of polymers in the materials pantheon. 

CHAPTER 7 Nylon, Polyester, and Wallace Hume Carothers... 

Roger Adams. Wallace Hume Carothers. Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences. 20 (1939) 293-309. Source for Carothers academic record wide interests best Illinois student Conant on Carothers teaching effectively and nylon s significance. 

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