Abstract
Wallace Hume Carothers holds a place of pride amongst the pantheons of twentieth-century chemists who transformed our way of thinking, and brought an entirely new perspective to a branch of science. Polymer science fiourished in the years after Carothers as never before, and led to the creation of a new industry–vibrant, useful, and exciting. The greatness of Carothers lies in the profound, yet simple questions he asked, and the clarity and deflnitiveness with which he provided the answers. In a short working span of eleven years, he left behind an incredible legacy of achievements which ordinary mortals cannot even dream of accomplishing in several lifetimes. This article chronicles the life and times of Wallace Carothers, the men and the institutions that inspired him, his seminal contributions to polymer chemistry; the mood of melancholy that permeated his persona and which ultimately cost him his life.
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Collected Works of Wallace Hume Carothers on High Polymeric Substances, Eds. H Mark, G S Whitby, Interscience Publishers, New York, 1940
G B Kauffman, J.Chem.Edu., 65, 803 (1988).
I have drawn much of the material for this article from the following sources (a) Enough for One Lifetime, Wallace Carothers, Inventor of Nylon, Matthew E Hermes, American Chemical Society and Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1996 and (b) Science and Corporate Strategy, Du Pont R&D, 1902-80, D A Hounshell and J K Smith, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1988
J K Smith and D A Hounshell, Science, Vol.229, p.436, 1985.
P Coffey, Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries that Made Modern Chemistry, Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Ref.2a, p.90
E Fischer, Chem. Ber., Vol.46, p.3287, 1913.
H Staudinger, Ber. Dtsch. Chem. Ges., Vol.53, p.1073, 1920; for a more detailed description of this debate, see, H Morawetz, Angew. Chem. Int.Ed., Vol.26, p.93, 1987.
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Ref.2a, p.132
W H Carothers and G J Berchet, J. Am. Chem. Soc., Vol.52, p.5289, 1930.
W H Carothers, Trans. Faraday Soc., Vol.32, p.39, 1936; this was probably the last paper he wrote when he was alive.
Ref.2a, p.83
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S Sivaram (www.swaminathansivaram.in) is currently a Honorary Professor and INSA Senior Scientist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune. Prior to this he was a CSIR-Bhatnagar Fellow (2011–16) and Director of CSIR-NCL (2002–2010). Apart from pursuing research in polymer chemistry, Sivaram is a keen student of history of science and the origin, and evolution of thoughts that drive the scientiflc enterprise.
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Sivaram, S. Wallace Hume Carothers and the birth of rational polymer synthesis. Reson 22, 339–353 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-017-0474-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-017-0474-1