Fiber of life

My, my, time does roll around, doesn’t it? Seems like only yesterday I was writing about Beatrice Shilling, the woman who solved one of the more important engineering problems for the Royal Air Force during World War II. But, here we are at Ada Lovelace Day again, and I’m spoilt for choice in terms of subject matter.

But since I’m a military historian, I’ll stay with my area of expertise (a couple of years ago I introduced you to Joan Strothers Curran, who developed “window” or “chaff”, which was successfully used to confuse German radar reception in aid of D-Day). I’m honoring Stephanie L. Kwolek, the chemist whose curiosity led to the synthetic fiber we now know as Kevlar.

Kwolek, who died in June at age 90, actually took the job with the textile chemistry division of the DuPont Company as a temporary measure between undergraduate study and medical school. (As a child, she loved sewing and working with fabrics, but her mother convinced her that she wouldn’t make a good fashion designer because she was such a perfectionist; so she gave that up for medicine.) But she found the research she was doing into polymers so interesting that she decided she was where she should be and dug in.

It was in the mid-1960s, while she was looking into the creation of fibers capable of performing in extreme conditions, that she came across something that didn’t emerge from the process as expected—instead of a clear, syrupy liquid, it was thin and opaque. Ordinarily this sort of disappointing output would have been thrown away (which is what her colleagues wanted to do), but Kwolek was curious. She persuaded one of them to run it through a spinning process to remove liquid solvent and reveal fibers.

What came out of the spinneret was an exceptionally stiff fiber that tested five times as strong as steel of equal weight. It was also fire resistant. The DuPont crowd latched onto its potential right away—Kevlar has been used by law enforcement officers and combat troops since the mid-70s. It’s integral to body armor and helmets that deflect handgun and rifle fire, as well as shrapnel (which is ugly, ugly stuff).

Additionally, the fiber is used in tires, sporting equipment, cables and cellular phones.

Here’s what I really like about Kwolek: she was curious. She saw possibilities where her colleagues saw useless goop. She was willing to push for further information, again and again. She saw connections and tested everything. She was a successful and respected professional in an industry that typically expects those qualities to come in a package containing the Y chromosome and advanced degrees. And she shared her experience, her expertise and her enthusiasm, inspiring generations of potential scientists.

A paper she co-wrote for the Journal of Chemical Education in 1959, “The Nylon Rope Trick”, describes how to demonstrate condensation polymerization in a beaker at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. Yeah, beyond me, too, but it’s commonly demonstrated in classrooms around the country.

It’s possible that someone would have come up with a Kevlar-like fiber eventually, but Stephanie L. Kwolek got there first, doing what she loved. Saving thousands of lives, doing what you love; it don’t get any better than that.