The American chemist Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) was an experimentalist in the organic and industrial branches. His researches into polymerization led to the invention of nylon, the first truly synthetic fiber.

Artificial fibers, in the sense of being man-made, had been known since the closing decades of the 19th century; the first patents for processes resulting in fibers of the type later known as rayon were taken out as early as 1885. Once it had been discovered by x-ray analysis that natural fibers were composed of molecules that were themselves long and narrow, the possibility of building up such long molecules from small units, so producing new fibers, had been envisaged. Wallace Carothers, who more than anyone enabled this possibility to be realized, died the year before the creation of nylon was announced by E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, whose research team he had led with...