Wallace Hume Carothers
1896-1937
American Chemist
Wallace Carothers quite literally transformed the texture of human life. His assignment as director of a research team for the DuPont Company marked the culmination of a promising career, and the promise bore fruit: Carothers's experiments with polymer plasticsyielded nylon, one of the most significant inventions of the twentieth century, and the first synthetic fiber. He would probably have won a Nobel Prize, as some have speculated, yet just before he turned 40, Carothers—who in addition to his career successes was a newlywed with a first child on the way—took his own life.
Carothers was born on April 27, 1896, in Burlington, Iowa, the oldest of Ira and Mary McMullin Carothers's four children. His sister, Isobel, was destined to go on to celebrity as a member of the radio musical trio "Clara, Lu, and Em." Carothers's father was a teacher at Capital City Commercial College in Des Moines, and the son enrolled there to study accountancy in 1914. A highly advanced student, he completed the accountancy program in just one year, and went on to study chemistry at Tarkio College in Missouri.
During World War I, wartime duties forced Arthur Pardee, head of the chemistry department, to leave Tarkio. Unable to replace him, the college appointed Carothers, who was ineligible for military service due to health reasons, to take his place—this despite the fact that he was only an undergraduate. Carothers earned his B.S. in chemistry in 1920, and went on to the University of Illinois, where he completed his master's degree a year later.
Pardee convinced Carothers to join him at the University of South Dakota, where he taught for a year, but by 1922 he was back at the University of Illinois to complete his Ph.D. work. He earned his doctorate in 1924, then began teaching at the university. In 1926, however, Harvard selected Carothers above numerous candidates, and he went east to teach. At Harvard, he began experimenting with high molecular weight polymers, an activity that attracted the attention of the DuPont Company. In 1928, DuPont invited him to direct a new research program at their headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, where Carothers would head a team of scientists. It was an offer even more attractive than Harvard, and 32-year-old Carothers accepted.
At first Carothers focused on molecules in the acetylene family, and by 1931 his experiments with combinations of vinylacetylene and chlorine had yielded a synthetic rubber that the company marketed as neoprene. This alone would have been a great claim to fame, but within a few years Carothers produced something even greater, a synthetic equivalent of silk. He knew that he needed to create a chemical reaction that would produce long molecules oriented in the same direction. A series of experiments led to an understanding of how polymers were created, and this in turn yielded nylon. The latter would debut in 1938, and became a huge sensation at the World's Fair a year later. By then, however, Carothers was dead.
In 1936, he married Helen Sweetman, who worked in the patent division at DuPont. Though highly enthusiastic about his work, Carothers was always shy and withdrawn, so his marriage must have come as a surprise. He was, however, a talented singer, something he shared with his sister Isobel, his closest sibling. Her death in January 1937 sent him into a bout of depression, and on April 29, he committed suicide in Philadelphia. Seven months later, on November 27, Helen gave birth to a daughter, Jane.
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