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).
Plastic
After World War I, improvements in chemical technology led to an explosion in new forms of plastics, with mass production beginning in the 1940s and 1950s (around World War II). Among the earliest examples in the wave of new polymers were polystyrene (PS), first produced by BASF in the 1930s, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), first created in 1872 but commercially produced in the late 1920s. In 1923, Durite Plastics Inc. was the first manufacturer of phenol-furfural resins. In 1933, polyethylene was discovered by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) researchers Reginald Gibson and Eric Fawcett.