Ira Williams (1894–1977 [1]) was an American chemist at DuPont's Jackson Laboratory in New Jersey, who in the summer of 1930, [2] together with Wallace Carothers, Arnold Collins and F. B. Downing, made commercial Neoprene possible [3] by producing a soft, plastic form of chloroprene that could be processed by the rubber industry. [4] [5] Early accounts of the development credited Julius Nieuwland with synthesizing the precursor divinylacetylene. [6] Williams' contribution was the discovery that the rheological behavior of the product could be controlled by quenching the polymerization reaction with alcohol.
He won the 1946 Charles Goodyear Medal.
References
- ^ Patterson, Gary (2014). Polymer Science from 1935-1953: Consolidating the Paradigm. Springer. p. 28. ISBN 9783662435366.
- ^ Smith, John K. (1985). "Ten-Year Invention: Neoprene and Du Pont Research, 1930–1939". Technology and Culture. 26 (1): 34–55. doi: 10.2307/3104528. JSTOR 3104528. S2CID 113234844.
- ^ McHugh, F. D. (January 1932). "New Commercial Synthetic Rubber". The Scientific American Digest. Vol. 146, no. 1. Nature America, Inc. JSTOR 24965828. Retrieved 7 January 2024.
- ^ Hounshell, David A.; Smith, John Kenly (1988). Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R and D, 1902-1980. Cambridge University Press. p. 251. ISBN 9780521327671.
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^
Wallace H. Carothers, Ira Williams,
Arnold M. Collins, and James E. Kirby (1937). "Acetylene Polymers and their Derivatives. II. A New Synthetic Rubber: Chloroprene and its Polymers".
J. Am. Chem. Soc. 53 (11): 4203–4225.
doi:
10.1021/ja01362a042.
{{ cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) - ^ "Duprene". TIME Magazine. Vol. 18, no. 20. TIME USA, LLC. 16 November 1931. Retrieved 6 January 2024.
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