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).
Solid state ionics
In 1975, Peter V. Wright, a polymer chemist from Sheffield (UK), produced the first polymer electrolyte, which contained sodium and potassium salts in a polyethylene oxide (PEO) matrix. Later another type of polymer electrolytes, polyelectrolyte, was put forward, where ions moved through an electrically charged, rather than neutral, polymer matrix. Polymer electrolytes showed lower conductivities than glasses, but they were cheaper, much more flexible and could be easier machined and shaped into various forms. While ionic glasses are typically operated below, polymer conductors are typically heated above their glass transition temperatures. Consequently, both the electric field and mechanical deformation decay on a similar time scale in polymers, but not in glasses.
Between 1983 and 2001 it was believed that the amorphous fraction is responsible for ionic conductivity, i.e., that (nearly) complete structural disorder is essential for the fast ionic transport in polymers. However, a number of crystalline polymers have been described in 2001 and later with ionic conductivity as high as 0.01 S/cm 30 °C and activation energy of only 0.24 eV.