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).
Emulsion polymerization
The early history of emulsion polymerization is connected with the field of synthetic rubber. The idea of using an emulsified monomer in an aqueous suspension or emulsion was first conceived at Bayer, before World War I, in an attempt to prepare synthetic rubber. The impetus for this development was the observation that natural rubber is produced at room temperature in dispersed particles stabilized by colloidal polymers, so the industrial chemists tried to duplicate these conditions. The Bayer workers used naturally occurring polymers such as gelatin, egg albumin, and starch to stabilize their dispersion. By today's definition these were not true emulsion polymerizations, but suspension polymerizations.