The Beginning Of Synthetics

Nearly five thousand years after a Chinese Empress discovered, quite by chance, how to unwind the fine thread of the cocoon of a silkworm, a Frenchman, experimenting with the crushed leaves of the mulberry tree on which the silkworm feeds found out how to produce a fine silk-like fibre which we now call artificial silk. His discovery stimulated other scientists to search for new fibres, and it was not long before several more were produced, but all of them had as their starting-point some natural organic material, such as cellulose, casein, etc. It is only fairly recently that man has succeeded in synthesizing new fibres from inorganic materials. Everyone has heard of nylon, and scarcely one of us can say he doesn’t use something made from this product every day. But nylon was the first of an ever-lengthening list of new synthetic fibres. Now hardly a year passes without some new fibre making its appearance and some unfamiliar name finding its way into our everyday speech.