Materials

Goodyear spent years obsessed with gum elastic, accidentally finding sulfur-heat curing around 1839 and patenting vulcanization in...

Bessemer patented the converter that blasted air through molten pig iron, burning impurities and making steel cheaply at scale. Wi...

Belgian-American chemist Baekeland patented phenol-formaldehyde resin, the first plastic not derived from plants or animals. Bakel...

Carothers' polyamide research at DuPont yielded nylon 6,6, patented 1938 after his death by suicide in 1937. Stockings introduced ...

Plunkett opened a tetrafluoroethylene cylinder in 1938 to find it empty, the gas having polymerized into white wax. PTFE was inert...

De Mestral, walking his dog through Alpine burrs in 1941, wondered why they clung, then spent a decade replicating hooks and loops...

Coover rejected cyanoacrylates in 1942 as ruined gun-sight plastics, then recognized their instant bonding in 1951 heat-resistant ...

Kwolek's 1965 liquid-crystal spinning solution looked cloudy and wrong, but she insisted on spinning it, yielding para-aramid fibe...

Bob Gore yanked heated PTFE instead of pulling it slowly, discovering expanded nodes-and-fibrils microstructure in 1969. The 1976 ...