preview

Stephanie Louis Kwolek Biography

Decent Essays

Stephanie Louis Kwolek was born on July 31, 1923, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. She died on June 18, 2014, in Wilmington, Delaware at the age of ninety. Her father had a great interest in science, and when he died when she was ten, she took up her father’s interest in natural science. She also had her mother’s love of fabrics and sewing. Kwolek had strong interests in teaching, chemistry, and medicine. Even though she had had her eye on medical school, she graduated from Margaret Morrison Carnegie College--the women’s college for Carnegie Mellon University--with a degree in chemistry when she was twenty three. After she graduated, she quickly got a job as a chemist at DuPont Chemicals in Buffalo, New York. She loved doing her research at DuPont, so she decided to give up her dreams for medical school and work in the field of chemistry. She moved to Wilmington, Delaware, four years later, where she continued work for DuPont, and remained working for them for the rest of her career.

Kwolek’s main major scientific breakthrough was her discovery of Kevlar, which she discovered after nine years of research. She had originally been doing lab work trying to find a new plastic material to be used in car tires. If she found a light plastic like this, they could make lighter tires …show more content…

The two molecules on the left are the chemicals that reacted to make Kevlar, which is the molecule on the right. Kevlar can be grown to different lengths so when people manufacture it, it can be fine tuned to a specific standard depending on what the intended use is for. This makes it so there are many different Kevlar grades that you can purchase and use. The chemicals used to make Kevlar are polyparaphenylene terephthalamide and terephthaloyl chloride. After this reaction is finished, the polymer that is produced is spun into strong, thick fibers. This polymer is extremely strongly bonded, and each strand is bound together by hydrogen

Get Access