The Woman Who Created Kevlar Has Died

Stephanie Kwolek, who was in 1965 a research chemist for DuPont when she invented a fiber that is stronger than steel, was 90 years old:

A pioneer as a woman in a heavily male field, Kwolek made the breakthrough while working on specialty fibers at a DuPont laboratory in Wilmington. At the time, DuPont was looking for strong, lightweight fibers that could replace steel in automobile tires and improve fuel economy.

“I knew that I had made a discovery,” Kwolek said in an interview several years ago that was included in the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s “Women in Chemistry” series. “I didn’t shout ‘Eureka,’ but I was very excited, as was the whole laboratory excited, and management was excited because we were looking for something new, something different, and this was it.” …

Kwolek is the only female employee of DuPont to be awarded the company’s Lavoisier Medal for outstanding technical achievement. She was recognized as a “persistent experimentalist and role model.”

“She leaves a wonderful legacy of thousands of lives saved and countless injuries prevented by products made possible by her discovery,” Kullman said.

During the “Women in Chemistry” interview, Kwolek recounted the development of Kevlar. She said she found a solvent that was able to dissolve long-chain polymers into a solution that was much thinner and more watery than other polymer solutions. She persuaded a skeptical colleague to put the solution into a spinneret, which turns liquid polymers into fibers.

“We spun it and it spun beautifully,” she recalled. “It was very strong and very stiff, unlike anything we had made before.”

The exceptionally tough fibers she produced were several times stronger by weight than steel. So strong, according to friend and former colleague Rita Vasta, that DuPont had to get new equipment to test the tensile strength.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.