Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014) used her creativity in chemistry to create something miraculous. Her discovery has saved thousands of lives and without her innovation, everything from drumheads to bridges to body-armor wouldn’t be the same as we know them today.
Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014) used her creativity in chemistry to create something miraculous. Her discovery has saved thousands of lives and without her innovation, everything from drumheads to bridges to body-armor wouldn’t be the same as we know them today.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Elsa Majimbo, and this is Womanica.
Today’s innovator used her creativity in chemistry to create something miraculous. Her discovery has saved thousands of lives and without her innovation, everything from drumheads to bridges to bodyarmor wouldn’t be the same as we know them today. Please welcome the brilliant Stephanie Kwolek.
Stephanie Kwolek was born in 1923 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, to Polish immigrants. She was a creative child with a variety of interests.
Her father was an amateur naturalist. Together, they’d explore the woods near their house and gather flowers and leaves for Stephanie’s scrapbook. Stephanie’s mother inspired her to mimic sewing patterns and design costumes for her paper dolls.
Tragically, Stephanie’s father passed away when she was 10 years old. Her mother had to search for work, while Stephanie looked after her younger brother.
When it came time for Stephanie to choose a career, she initially thought she would become a fashion designer – but her mother told her she was “too much of a perfectionist” to go into that field.
So instead, she set her sights on becoming a physician. Stephanie attended Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, a women’s college that later became part of Carnegie Mellon University, and studied chemistry. After earning her degree, she couldn’t afford to go to medical school right away. So she decided to put her chemistry degree to use and interviewed for a job at DuPont.
Stephanie didn’t plan on working in chemistry at all – but she was so fascinated by the job that she ended up staying with DuPont for over 40 years. She worked in a lab searching for ways to create polymers, developing new, innovative materials.
Decades into her career, DuPont tasked Stephanie with searching for a new family of lightweight synthetic fibers that could withstand extreme conditions. The job involved dissolving fibers called polyamides into a viscous liquid. Polyamides can occur in nature, in materials like wool and silk, but Stephanie worked with artificial versions to create materials like nylon.
The polyamide solution would then be spun around in a machine to create usable fibers, almost like a spinning wheel creating thread.
However, most of these liquids had to be melted at nearly 400 degrees Fahrenheit in order to be spun into fibers, a process that weakened the material. Stephanie needed to find something that would melt at a lower temperature.
Then one day, she made a surprising discovery.
Under certain conditions, the polyamides lined up just right, with molecules arranged in long, tough chains. The resulting liquid was thin and milky, not at all like the clear and syrupy liquid the lab typically worked with. .
Stephanie wanted to spin this new liquid into fibers, with the hunch that the strong molecule chains would be exactly what the team was looking for. But her colleagues that ran the machine were suspicious that this unknown material would break it. Stephanie insisted, and finally they agreed to run her experiment. To everyone’s shock, it worked. The resulting fiber was lighter than fiberglass, stronger than steel, and resistant to high heat.
Stephanie thought the results might have been a fluke at first. She waited until her evidence was airtight before she told management. As soon as she did, DuPont assigned a full team to work with what she had created. Soon, this material was refined into one of the most useful and widely used substances ever: Kevlar.
You can find Kevlar in sneakers, snare drums, undersea cables, bridges, frying pans, canoes, ropes, bulletproof vests, body armor and more. There are countless uses – and its lightweight strength has saved thousands of lives.
Kevlar made DuPont billions of dollars, but Stephanie never saw any of that money; she had signed away the patent royalties to the company.
DuPont awarded Stephanie with the Lavoisier Medal, an award for outstanding contributions to the company. She is the only woman to receive the honor.
Stephanie earned many other recognitions for her incredible discovery, including induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994, the National Medal of Technology in 1996, the Perkin Medal from the Society of Chemical Industry in 1997, and induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2003.
In 1986, Stephanie retired from DuPont. In retirement she continued consulting for the company and served on academic committees like the National Academy of Sciences. She also tutored high schoolers in chemistry, and became an advocate for women in science.
Stephanie lived in Delaware until she passed away in 2014 at age 90.
For more information and pictures of some of the work we’re talking about, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to co-creators Jenny and Liz Kaplan.