THE DEVELOPMENT OF PLASTICS INVOLVED EXPERIMENTATION AND DISCOVERY

In Chapter 12, you learned about the great variety of synthetic polymers and their uses. This section covers the inventors who developed these polymers and the effect these new materials have had on society. The successes and failures in the story of plastics show how chemistry is a process of experimentation and discovery. As you read through this section, you may want to refer back to the structures and reactions shown in Chapter 12. 

In 1839, an American inventor, Charles Goodyear, discovered rubber vulcanization, a process in which natural rubber and sulfur are heated together. The 

In 1845, as vulcanized rubber was becoming popular, the Swiss chemistry professor Christian Schobein wiped up a spilled mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids with a cotton rag that he then hung up to dry. Within a few minutes, the rag burst into flames and then vanished, leaving only a tiny bit of ash. Schobein had discovered nitrocellulose, in which most of the hydroxyl groups in cellulose are 

Stretched with little tendency to snap back to original form 

Stretched with great tendency to snap back because of cross-links 

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