Elmer Keiser Bolton
When Wallace Carothers arrived at DuPont in 1928 one of the tasks his group took on was the development of new synthetic fibers for textiles. At that time a number of natural polymers such as latex and cellulose were in common use, rayon as a semisynthetic from nitrated cellulose had recently been improved and begun upending the textile industries, and some fully synthetic polymers such as bakelite were also known and being used for certain applications, but the existing fully synthetic polymers could not be drawn into fibers and spun into thread, so great opportunity existed to manufacture thread and yarn from synthetic polymers to join or replace the existing fibers in the market (natural fibers such as cotton, wool, linen, and silk and artificial fiber in the various recently emerged types of rayon).
Elmer Keiser Bolton
Bolton's group's work on synthetic rubber began with the polymerization of butadiene obtained from the hydrogenation of diacetylene, and at first not much progress was made. At the end of 1925 Bolton met chemist Julius Arthur Nieuwland from the University of Notre Dame who had discovered a way to polymerize acetylene using a cuprous oxide catalyst. Unfortunately the resulting polymer would explode when struck, but Bolton believed the process could be modified to produce a stable compound that would replace butadiene in the reaction. Bolton brought Nieuwland into the project as a consultant to DuPont, and Nieuwland taught the DuPont chemists how to use his catalyst. A continuous-flow reactor was developed that would produce a good yield of the stable polymer Bolton was seeking. While the polymer was highly chemical resistant, it degraded with exposure to light.