Word: nieuwland
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...rubber from acet ylene (product of coal and limestone), salt and water. While the rubber chem ists cheered, the three young du Ponters ? W. H. Carothers, F. B. Downing, Ira Williams ? generously gave most of the credit to a 53-year-old Catholic priest, Rev. Julius Arthur Nieuwland, C.S.C., of Notre Dame University. Father Nieuwland, born a Belgian, at tended Notre Dame and later settled down in South Bend to a life of avowed poverty and chemical research. In 1906 he passed some acetylene into a copper salt mixture and obtained therefrom a strange and terrific stench...
...Father Nieuwland, holding his nose, decided that if he could separate the derivative responsible for the stench, he might have something interesting. Fifteen years later he succeeded: By use of a more highly concentrated mixture he produced a liquid which he called divinylacetylene. Father Nieuwland shook his head, decided it might be good for drying oil or possibly sheep...
...from discouraged, he lectured on his experiments. One day a scout for the du Pont Co. heard him, immediately enlisted his aid. Du Pont was seeking a means of producing synthetic rubber, thought Father Nieuwiand might be on the right track. Two years later Father Nieuwland's divinylacetylene was treated with a vulcanizing agent and there was produced a material somewhat resembling rubber. It bounced...
Experiments continued at the du Pont Co.'s Jackson Laboratories and in Father Nieuwland's laboratory at Notre Dame. The chemists gave up working on divinylacetylene and concentrated on the more homely mono-vinylacetylene. They treated it with hydrogen chloride and first thing they knew they had a fine pot of chloroprene. Chloroprene differs from rubber's polymer, isoprene, only in that a chlorine atom replaces the methyl group, so after that the going was fairly easy. They had only to polymerize the chloroprene to the right point, and all of them were experienced polymerizers. When they finished they...