Stephanie L. Kwolek, Inventor of Kevlar, Is Dead at 90

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/business/stephanie-l-kwolek-inventor-of-kevlar-is-dead-at-90.html?hp

by 001sky • 12 years ago

123 46 12 years ago

nytimes.com

aperrien• 12 years ago

I would not be around mucking with code today if not for this woman's work. May she rest in peace.

JoshTriplett• 12 years ago

That sounds like an interesting story; would you consider telling it?

aaronbrethorst• 12 years ago

great backstory:

    I had been looking for a lightweight fiber strong
    and stiff enough to use in reinforcement. At just
    about this time—it was 1964—there was talk of a
    gasoline shortage, and we thought we could use a
    reinforcing fiber lighter than steel for radial
    tires. A lighter-weight vehicle would require
    less gasoline. We were not very successful with
    the tire industry. It was using cheaper steel
    wire for reinforcement, and the change to fiber
    would have meant changing machinery at the tire
    plants. So we expanded our research for new
    end-use applications, and we now have more than
    200 end-use applications for Kevlar.

http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americ...

resoluteteeth• 12 years ago

Incidentally, the use of Kevlar may not have caught on for cars, but it's pretty common in bicycle tires, so it has in some sense succeeded in the original intended application in the end as well.

hga13• 12 years ago

I think its use in tires is a lot more common now that radials have replaced the bias-ply tires that were most commonly used when Kevlar was invented. The latter are good for bad roads, but I have the impression that they're not particular about the reinforcing material they use. A material science engineer who worked at a DuPont nylon plant in the '80s mentioned that nylon was used for bias-ply tires for mostly Third World markets.

Goodyear, at least, seems to make a number of models with Kevlar: https://www.google.com/search?q=kevlar+radial+tire

But of course Kevlar is a trademark of DuPont, general patents on it have long expired. A more general search https://www.google.com/search?q=aramid+radial+tire using aramid instead of Kevlar is also fruitful, especially this 1974 story http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cen-v052n008.p007a about Goodyear entering the market with them. That's very well timed, less than half a year after the 1973 oil shock, when fuel efficiency became a very big thing. No doubt they were working on such tires, and the shock provided a perfect marketing opportunity, in addition to the other benefits Kevlar brought to the table.

"Steel belted" is a phrase that I'm sure is hard to market against, as I recall it was used a lot in the '70s....

dnautics• 12 years ago

I have always put Stephanie Kwolek on my "long odds but beyond deserving" list for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Alas, she never won it.

jcreedon• 12 years ago

Kevlar has generated several billion dollars in revenue for the company. Ms. Kwolek did not directly benefit from it financially, however; she signed over patent royalties to DuPont.

This is kind of sad to me. I realize it is more or less standard practice to sign over all IP rights to your employer, but this was a significantly greater contribution than your standard invention. Reminds me of the engineer who created the blue LED who only received a bonus of <$200. He later sued and got closer to $9m. (http://www.out-law.com/page-5208)

dueprocess• 12 years ago

Charles Goodyear, the inventor of vulcanized rubber, wrote in his memoir, "Inventors are the children of misfortune and want."

Goodyear himself suffered unbelievable hardships during his life, even after making one of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century.

It's a good a time as ever to reveal "Die Penniless". It's a checklist / personal assessment system for creative geniuses who want to make history. For first access when it launches, please sign up here: http://diepenniless.com

cpwright• 12 years ago

She signed the patent royalties over to DuPont, but that is the deal that she made. There is at least an equal chance that she never would have created this material (there are scores of other men and women who have worked for DuPont, but not an equal number of such incredible breakthroughs). She traded away the ability to hit a home run for lower variance in compensation. She collected a salary, and I would hope that she indirectly financially benefited from potential promotions or raises.

Also, without the resources of DuPont she never would have been able to create this material.

It is a great invention, and she is certainly a great inventor; but just because she didn't become fabulously wealthy doesn't mean she was treated poorly.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

Also, without the resources of DuPont she never would have been able to create this material.

Irrelevant. The need for capital doesn't inherently justify capital receiving ~100% of the proceeds. Her work was also a necessary part of creating the product.

She collected a salary, and I would hope that she indirectly financially benefited from potential promotions or raises.

I don't think you understand how bad chemists have it. The guy who invented lipitor ($120 billion in revenue) was unceremoniously laid off from Pfizer for his trouble. He didn't get a penny on top of his salary -- a salary that half of the readers of this post probably wouldn't accept for a software development position.

just because she didn't become fabulously wealthy doesn't mean she was treated poorly

No, but the labor force of industrial chemists is generally a heavily deleveraged group. There's an oversupply of them and they absolutely require intensive capital resources for success. That means they get systematically shafted at the bargaining table. They are treated poorly regardless of whether or not this individual incident is sufficient to prove it.

Due to the fact that software development has tiny capital requirements and that there are many industrial positions available for software engineers, we are able to negotiate much more reasonable terms of employment (i.e. capture a comparatively respectable fraction of the value we create). We have it good. Unusually good. It's important to remember that this is not because markets operate that way in general. It's a happy accident that has turned out well for us so far. Nothing more, nothing less. The very least we can do is refrain from victim-blaming in industries where labor is not blessed with the same happy accident.

noja• 12 years ago

Ironically he was stabbed to death while wearing a kevlar vest.

clvrly• 12 years ago

That does not make sense.

taspeotis3• 12 years ago

    noja 4 hours ago | link | parent | flag
    Ironically he was stabbed to death while wearing a kevlar vest.

You need to work on your reading comprehension:

    Stephanie L. Kwolek
    Stephanie L.
    Stephanie

Stephanie is literally the first word in the title and article.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

Both men and women are called "Stephanie", although in the US it is mostly a female name.

http://www.babynames.it/boyname/Stephanie-meaning.htm

The mistake was to assume a male. It doesn't matter what the name was.

hga13• 12 years ago

In addition to the other comments, it should be noted that soft body armor materials aren't useful against edged weapons, the required physical properties are very different.

shrikant• 12 years ago

A DuPont spokeswoman estimated that since the 1970s, 3,000 police officers have been saved from bullet wounds through the use of equipment reinforced with Kevlar [...]

Does that number seem really low to anybody else?

hga13• 12 years ago

Have you ever worn Kevlar body armor?

The Feds have rather stupid requirements for it, that don't match the real world, but depend on deformation of clay behind a vest.

So what cops wear is stiffer, and perhaps hotter than needed. Although I think heat is unavoidable, there's even relevant lines in Shakespeare's King Henry the Fourth:

  Like a rich armour worn in heat of day,
  That scalds with safety.

So plenty of cops are killed because they're not wearing their uncomfortable armor; it's sort of like strapping a barrel around your torso.

Another factor is that better, albeit more expensive polymers have been developed, especially very long chain polyethylene (as in 1-2 million units long); my next vest will be made from that. Also Kevlar loses its protective strength if wet. There was also a short period where a very bad new polymer was used by at least one company, it quickly degraded, and that cost a few cops their lives.

Finally, while the gun-grabbers' campaign against non-existent "cop killer bullets!!!" accomplished nothing directly affecting cops on the ground, indirectly it taught a lot of people that cops wear body armor, resulting, or so I've read without personally drilling down to the raw data, an increase in criminals killing them with head shots.

Ah, I should also note that soft body armor saves by preventing penetration, and decreases kinetic impact by stretching the fibers. So a hit can still hurt a lot, enough to potentially fatally distract you during a fight, especially bad if you're alone. My home defense body armor has a hard rifle plate in the front to mitigate this.

Ah, I should also add some numbers. There aren't that many cops killed on duty, here's numbers broken down by years: http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.htm...

I don't think Kevlar body armor went into common use until perhaps the '80s, and without adding heavy rifle plates, which only SWAT teams routinely use (and our troops in the last decade), it offers very little protection against the #1 killer of cops, vehicle related accidents (in them, or struck by them).

reader50003• 12 years ago

...especially bad if you're alone. My home defense body armor has a hard rifle plate in the front to mitigate this.

I can't understand why a well-rounded individual like yourself would be living alone.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

my next vest will be made from that

Holly molly, do you live in Iraq or Syria, or some other war zone?

AmVess• 12 years ago

Former LEO here.

I wore it in mild weather (80F), and it wasn't a bother. Hot, but not uncomfortably so. Our portable offices where air conditioned, so this helped quite a lot.

Traffic related accidents are more dangerous overall than getting shot, IIRC. Small sample size: I was never shot at, but T-Boned twice while driving through a intersections. Both times, not under code, but normal traffic speed.

Nitwits.

jameshart• 12 years ago

No, no it doesn't. Kevlar has been available to the police for 40 years. 3000 bullets stopped over 40 years amounts to a cop getting shot and saved by kevlar every 4.9 days. I assume that for every 10 cops saved by kevlar, some number are not saved... so that implies that people are firing bullets at cops even more frequently than that.

If that seems low, then I think we have a real problem...

hga13• 12 years ago

Although that's "save from a bullet wound". Some time ago I read about a statistic that normal, street handgun rounds have about a 1 in 4 chance of killing someone hit in the torso. I'd presume since then improvements in and additional trauma centers have dropped that.

On the other hand we shouldn't denigrate the utility of preventing any bullet wound; just surviving is a low threshold, contrary to many Hollywood portrayals getting shot is a very bad thing that frequently won't result in complete return of function. I'd bet that's especially true for the torso hits normal concealable body armor stops. Not that heavier external body armor has that much greater coverage, although I'm sure there's additional saves with it.

001sky• 12 years ago

Spectra dominates most applications today, so kevlar is not used so much for ballistics vests. Additionally, the police are not the main customers, much is military. Third, kevlar is still used for cut-resistance but that will not show up in this data (nor would the military lives saved). So for these and other reasons, its intuitively correct to think that the invetion of kevlar has broadly saved more lives than what is mentioned. Or at least that would be my guess. Other people may have actual data to flesh the subject out.

hga13• 12 years ago

Spectra is one of the brand names for the ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE, UHMW) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-molecular-weight_po... I mentioned in one of my other postings in this subthread.

I've gotten the impression, at least from one vendor, that mixed aramid and UHMWPE fabrics are common for law enforcement vests, due to their lower cost. And of course plain aramid is still cheaper, so is still used a lot.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

Life isn't TV. Most cops never fire their gun. My neighbor growing up was a grizzled NYPD patrol sergeant. He said that he never pulled his gun on anyone, but he cracked a few heads in his time with a club. Nowadays, it's easier to shoot than to beat up people.

Stephanie L. Kwolek, Inventor of Kevlar, Is Dead at 90

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