Dr. Stephanie L. Kwolek
Stephanie Louise Kwolek was born in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, on July 31, 1923. Her father, John, an amateur naturalist, taught her to love exploring the natural world. Her mother, Nellie, taught her to love fabric and sewing.
Kwolek enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in 1942. Majoring in chemistry and minoring in biology, she hoped to enter medical school after earning her bachelor's degree. Upon graduating, she took a job at DuPont to build savings for her further education, but this was a plan she never carried out.
Dr. Kwolek with DuPontcoworkers Herbert Blades,
Paul Morgan, John Griffing,
and Eugene Magat.
Beginning with the Rayon Department in Buffalo, four years later Kwolek was moved to the Pioneering Research Laboratory in Wilmington Delaware. The next 36 years of her career were spent working in chemistry. In 1964 Kwolek was assigned to research extra strong and stable polymers. Turning to liquid crystal solutions in which all the molecules line up in one direction, her experiments yielded a solution unlike any she'd ever seen.
Stephanie Kwolek with
(l to r) Herbert Blades,
Dr. Paul
Morgan, and
Dr. Joseph L. Rivers.
"What I saw as unusual with the solution I created, " Kwolek said,"was its very low viscosity. Most polymer solutions are thick, more like syrup. This was more like water. The other unusual thing was that it was hazy--milky-looking. Most solutions are transparent." The technician who put the solution into the fiber-making machine, called a spinneret, was nervous. He thought the milky solution probably had solid particles that would clog up the spinneret's fine holes. Once Kwolek convinced him to try it, the resulting fibers were exceptionally strong--much stronger, in fact, than steel.
