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).
Electroactive polymers
In 1999, Yoseph Bar-Cohen proposed the Armwrestling Match of EAP Robotic Arm Against Human Challenge. This was a challenge in which research groups around the world competed to design a robotic arm consisting of EAP muscles that could defeat a human in an arm wrestling match. The first challenge was held at the Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conference in 2005. Another major milestone of the field is that the first commercially developed device including EAPs as an artificial muscle was produced in 2002 by Eamex in Japan. This device was a fish that was able to swim on its own, moving its tail using an EAP muscle. But the progress in practical development has not been satisfactory.