Polymers Win in World War II

In the 1930s, more than 90 percent of the natural rubber used in the United States came from Malaysia. In the days after Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941 and the United States entered World War II, however, Japan captured Malaysia. As a result, the United States—the land with plenty of everything, except rubber—faced its first natural resource crisis. The military implications were devastating because without rubber for tires, military airplanes and jeeps were useless. Petroleum-based synthetic rubber had been developed in 1930 by DuPont chemist Wallace Carothers but was not widely used because it was much more expensive than natural rubber. With Malaysian rubber impossible to get and a war on, however, cost was no longer an issue. Synthetic rubber factories were constructed across the nation, and within a few years, the annual production of synthetic rubber rose from 2000 tons to about 800,000 tons. 

Soviet tanks and artillery functioned perfectly, resulting in victory and an important turning point in the war. 

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) had been developed by a number of chemical companies in the 1920s. The problem with this material, however, was that it lost resiliency when heated. In 1929, Waldo Semon, a chemist at BFGoodrich, found that PVC could be made into a workable material by the addition of a plasticizer. Semon got the idea of using plasticized PVC as a shower curtain when he observed his wife sewing together a shower curtain made of rubberized cotton. 

Other uses for PVC were slow to appear, however, and it wasn t until World War II that this material became recognized as an ideal waterproof material for tents and rain gear. 

After the war, PVC replaced Bakelite as the medium for making phonograph records. 

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