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Wallace Hume Carothers was an American chemist and inventor, who was a group leader at DuPont Experimental Station laboratory, and also credited for assisting in the invention of Nylon.
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Key Facts & Information
PERSONAL LIFE
- Wallace Hume Carothers was born on 27 April 1896 in Burlington, Iowa, to Ira and Mary Evalina Carothers. He was the oldest of one brother and two sisters, John, Isobel, and Elizabeth.
- Wallace went to public school in Des Moines in Iowa. After graduation Wallace, enrolled at the Capital City Commercial College in Des Moines, completing the accountancy and secretarial curriculum in July 1915.
- In September 1915, Wallace went to Tarkio College in Missouri. He majored in English but switched to Chemistry. He was influenced by Arthur Pardee, who was the head of the department. Wallace excelled in chemistry; before he graduated, he was promoted to be a chemistry instructor.
- Carothers would study and teach the senior course when Pardee became chairman of the chemistry department at the University of South Dakota. He graduated from Tarkio in 1920 at 24 years old, with a bachelor of science degree. He went to the University of Illinois for his master of arts degree, which he got in 1921 under Professor Carl Marvel.
LATER LIFE
- During 1921-22, Wallace had a one-year contract as a chemistry instructor at the University of South Dakota.
- Wallace went back to the University of Illinois to study for his Ph.D. under Roger Adams. He was a research assistant from 1922-1923 and received the Carr Fellowship for 1923-1924.
- He got his Doctorate in 1924, specializing in organic chemistry, and minored in physical chemistry and mathematics.
- In 1926 he was initiated into Alpha Chi Sigma as a member of the Zeta Chapter at the University of Illinois.
- In 1926, Wallace moved to Harvard University, where he was an instructor in organic chemistry. He became President of Harvard College in 1933.
- On 21 February 1936, Wallace married Helen Sweetman. They had a daughter together, but Wallace would never meet her.
- On 30 April 1936, Wallace was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
- On 8 January 1937, Wallacesβ sister Isobel died of pneumonia, which affected him deeply, and on 29 April 1937, Wallace committed suicide in a hotel room in Philadelphia.
RESEARCH WORK
- Wallace struggled with the idea of leaving academia. When DuPont made him an offer, rejecting their first offer, Hamilton Bradshaw from DuPont went to Harvard and convinced Wallace to change his mind.
- On 6 February 1928, Wallace began working for the DuPont Experimental Station. He wanted to synthesize a polymer with a molecular weight of more than 4 200.
- During the summer of 1928, Wallace had a small staff of Ph.D. chemists and two consultants, Dr. Roger Adams and Dr. Carl Marvel.
- By the middle of 1929, they had still not produced a polymer with a weight of much more than 4 000.
- Elmer K Bolton joined the team and was made assistant chemical director in the chemical department, making him Wallace’s boss, in January 1930.
- Arnold M Collins isolated chloroprene, a liquid that polymerized to produce a solid material that resembled rubber. In April 1930, they called it Neoprene.
- In 1930, Dr. Julian W Hill began attempting to produce a polyester with a molecular weight of above 4 000, producing a synthetic polymer with a molecular weight of 12 000. The high molecular weight allowed the polymer to be stretched into strings of fiber, therefore creating the first synthetic silk described as super polyester.
- Wallace came up with the theory of step-growth polymerization, creating the Carothers equation, which relates to the average degree of polymerization to the fractional conversion of monomer into polymer.
- Hill also produced a synthetic fiber that had elasticity and was strong by combining glycols and diacids. The fiber couldn’t be produced for commercial use because it turned to a sticky mass when placed in hot water. Wallace stopped research on polymers for several years.
- In 1934, Wallace returned his focus to fibers again. His team substituted diamines for glycols to produce a type of polymer called polyamide, producing a more stable polyester by using glycols. Producing synthetic silk that could that could be used, in everyday life.
- During 1934, Wallace worked on linear super-polymers unrestricted research with no objective in mind.
- During the research, Wallace found super polymers that became viscous solids at high temperatures, where observations were made that filaments could be made from this material if a rod was dipped in molten polymer and withdrawn. Shifting the project to the filaments resulted in the creation of Nylon.
- On 18 February 1935, Wallace directed Gerard Berchet to produce half an ounce of polymer from hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid, which created polyamide 6-6, the substance, that would come to be known as Nylon. Nylon was difficult to work with because of the high melting point, but Dr. Bolton chose this to develop commercially. Dr. Bolton got Dr. George Graves to work with Wallace on the project. Dr. Graves replaced Wallace as the leader of the project.
Wallace Hume Carothers Worksheets
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