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).
Catalyst transfer polymerization
The first reports of CTP came simultaneously from the labs of Yokozawa and McCullough in 2004, with the recognition that polythiophene can be synthesized with low dispersity and control over molecular weight when a grignard thiophene monomer was polymerized with Nickel(1,2-bis(diphenylphosphino)ethane)dichloride. This recognition sparked interest in the system, and its expansion to other monomers. Despite major advances in the field, relatively few polymers can be synthesized via CTP because the lack of a "universal CTP catalyst" means that every monomer must be paired with a different catalyst in order to obtain ideal living chain-growth behavior. This need to pair monomers to catalysts means most conjugated polymers are synthesized via palladium catalyzed step-growth polycondensation cross-coupling reactions.