She Accidentally Invented Kevlar In 1965, And It’s Now Used In Everything From Aerospace Engineering To Bulletproof Vests And Car Breaks
Meet Stephanie Kwolek, the female chemist who invented Kevlar. The invention came about accidentally while she was looking for better fibers to use in tires.
Now, Kevlar is used in vast applications, such as aerospace engineering, bulletproof vests, boats, and car brakes, to name a few.
Stephanie was born in 1923 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. She spent a lot of time with her father, exploring the fields and woods near their house until he died when she was 10 years old. From her mother, she inherited a love of sewing and working with fabrics.
After Stephanie graduated from the women’s college at Carnegie Mellon University, she started working as a chemist with the DuPont Company in 1946.
She had planned to earn enough money at the job to go to medical school, but she quickly fell in love with the work, which combined her interests in science and textiles. So, she decided to make chemistry her career.
Stephanie was one of the only female scientists at DuPont. When she was in her 40s, she volunteered for a project that none of her colleagues seemed enthusiastic about.
It involved searching for a strong but lightweight fiber that could perform under extreme conditions. The goal was to use it for tires.
While conducting experiments, Stephanie created a strange solution. It was a thin and cloudy fluid instead of thick and clear.
She decided to keep working with the solution to see if it would come to anything. The next step in the process was to create fibers using a machine called a spinneret.
OlgaOvcharenko – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual dog
Charles Smullen, her coworker and the person in charge of the spinning equipment, initially refused to spin the solution.
He feared that it would harm the machine. But finally, Stephanie persuaded him to run it. To their surprise, strong and stiff fibers came back. The stiffness of the fibers was at least nine times greater than anything she had made before.
Everyone at DuPont recognized the significance of Stephanie’s discovery. From then on, many fibers were spun from the solution, including the yellow Kevlar fiber.
Kevlar has gone on to save countless lives as body armor for the police and military. Its most famous application is the Kevlar vest. A police officer from Virginia even had Stephanie autograph the bulletproof vest that saved his life.
Kevlar is also used to protect undersea optical fiber cables and to reinforce ropes to suspend bridges. It is found in hundreds of everyday products as well, such as canoes, frying pans, and tennis rackets.
Stephanie has received several awards for her invention of Kevlar fiber, including the National Medal of Technology in 1996 and the Perkin Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1997.
In addition, she was the fourth female member to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1995. In 2003, she was added to the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
Furthermore, Stephanie served as a mentor for other female scientists and helped introduce science to young kids.
She passed away in 2014 at the age of 90. Her contributions to science continue to live on long after her death. It’s amazing what she was able to create from something so simple as a test tube!
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