Emily Chan
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.
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