
Stephanie L. Kwolek, Inventor of Kevlar, Is Dead at 90 - 001sky
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/business/stephanie-l-kwolek-inventor-of-kevlar-is-dead-at-90.html?hp
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jcreedon
> Kevlar has generated several billion dollars in revenue for the company. Ms.
> Kwolek did not directly benefit from it financially, however; she signed
> over patent royalties to DuPont.

This is kind of sad to me. I realize it is more or less standard practice to
sign over all IP rights to your employer, but this was a significantly greater
contribution than your standard invention. Reminds me of the engineer who
created the blue LED who only received a bonus of <$200. He later sued and got
closer to $9m. ([http://www.out-law.com/page-5208](http://www.out-
law.com/page-5208))

~~~
cpwright
She signed the patent royalties over to DuPont, but that is the deal that she
made. There is at least an equal chance that she never would have created this
material (there are scores of other men and women who have worked for DuPont,
but not an equal number of such incredible breakthroughs). She traded away the
ability to hit a home run for lower variance in compensation. She collected a
salary, and I would hope that she indirectly financially benefited from
potential promotions or raises.

Also, without the resources of DuPont she never would have been able to create
this material.

It is a great invention, and she is certainly a great inventor; but just
because she didn't become fabulously wealthy doesn't mean she was treated
poorly.

~~~
jjoonathan
> Also, without the resources of DuPont she never would have been able to
> create this material.

Irrelevant. The need for capital doesn't inherently justify capital receiving
~100% of the proceeds. Her work was also a necessary part of creating the
product.

> She collected a salary, and I would hope that she indirectly financially
> benefited from potential promotions or raises.

I don't think you understand how bad chemists have it. The guy who invented
lipitor ($120 billion in revenue) was unceremoniously laid off from Pfizer for
his trouble. He didn't get a penny on top of his salary -- a salary that half
of the readers of this post probably wouldn't accept for a software
development position.

> just because she didn't become fabulously wealthy doesn't mean she was
> treated poorly

No, but the labor force of industrial chemists is generally a heavily
deleveraged group. There's an oversupply of them and they absolutely require
intensive capital resources for success. That means they get systematically
shafted at the bargaining table. They _are_ treated poorly regardless of
whether or not this individual incident is sufficient to prove it.

Due to the fact that software development has tiny capital requirements and
that there are many industrial positions available for software engineers, we
are able to negotiate much more reasonable terms of employment (i.e. capture a
comparatively respectable fraction of the value we create). We have it good.
Unusually good. It's important to remember that this is _not_ because markets
operate that way in general. It's a happy accident that has turned out well
for us so far. Nothing more, nothing less. The very least we can do is refrain
from victim-blaming in industries where labor is not blessed with the same
happy accident.

------
shrikant
> A DuPont spokeswoman estimated that since the 1970s, 3,000 police officers
> have been saved from bullet wounds through the use of equipment reinforced
> with Kevlar [...]

Does that number seem really low to anybody else?

~~~
hga
Have you ever worn Kevlar body armor?

The Feds have rather stupid requirements for it, that don't match the real
world, but depend on deformation of clay behind a vest.

So what cops wear is stiffer, and perhaps hotter than needed. Although I think
heat is unavoidable, there's even relevant lines in Shakespeare's _King Henry
the Fourth_ :

    
    
      Like a rich armour worn in heat of day,
      That scalds with safety.
    

So plenty of cops are killed because they're not wearing their uncomfortable
armor; it's sort of like strapping a barrel around your torso.

Another factor is that better, albeit more expensive polymers have been
developed, especially very long chain polyethylene (as in 1-2 million units
long); my next vest will be made from that. Also Kevlar loses its protective
strength if wet. There was also a short period where a very bad new polymer
was used by at least one company, it quickly degraded, and that cost a few
cops their lives.

Finally, while the gun-grabbers' campaign against non-existent "cop killer
bullets!!!" accomplished nothing directly affecting cops on the ground,
indirectly it taught a lot of people that cops wear body armor, resulting, or
so I've read without personally drilling down to the raw data, an increase in
criminals killing them with head shots.

Ah, I should also note that soft body armor saves by preventing penetration,
and decreases kinetic impact by stretching the fibers. So a hit can still hurt
a lot, enough to potentially fatally distract you during a fight, especially
bad if you're alone. My home defense body armor has a hard rifle plate in the
front to mitigate this.

Ah, I should also add some numbers. There aren't _that_ many cops killed on
duty, here's numbers broken down by years:
[http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-
data/year.htm...](http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-
data/year.html)

I don't think Kevlar body armor went into common use until perhaps the '80s,
and without adding heavy rifle plates, which only SWAT teams routinely use
(and our troops in the last decade), it offers very little protection against
the #1 killer of cops, vehicle related accidents (in them, or struck by them).

~~~
AmVess
Former LEO here.

I wore it in mild weather (80F), and it wasn't a bother. Hot, but not
uncomfortably so. Our portable offices where air conditioned, so this helped
quite a lot.

Traffic related accidents are more dangerous overall than getting shot, IIRC.
Small sample size: I was never shot at, but T-Boned twice while driving
through a intersections. Both times, not under code, but normal traffic speed.

Nitwits.

~~~
hga
I've not tried it in really hot weather, and haven't found it to be really
uncomfortable, but certainly more that I judged worth it for my pretty low
current threat level. I do wear it very occasionally when I have to go out
late at night. (Level II-A from a company I've never heard of, 1994
manufacture, didn't go to any great effort to get something good or well
fitted (it's oversized at the belly, no doubt making that area a lot stiffer
due to overlap), it's more insurance for disasters and the like than anything
else.)

And thinking about it, if you ignore an ... adventure or two of my youngest
brother's with shoplifters while he was working retail at a men's clothing
store, none of my nuclear family have experienced any stranger face to face
crime, as you might put it.

But we do have a couple of incidents of sitting in front of a red light at an
intersection and BANG! Something like that also happened to my father
CORRECTION: while avoiding a head on collision with a Pepsi truck who's driver
was asleep, his company car, fortunately, got a non-disabling hit in the rear
left quarter. He did teach all of us to drive very defensively ... but there's
not much you can do when in front of a red light.

Nitwits indeed.

------
aaronbrethorst
great backstory:

    
    
        I had been looking for a lightweight fiber strong
        and stiff enough to use in reinforcement. At just
        about this time—it was 1964—there was talk of a
        gasoline shortage, and we thought we could use a
        reinforcing fiber lighter than steel for radial
        tires. A lighter-weight vehicle would require
        less gasoline. We were not very successful with
        the tire industry. It was using cheaper steel
        wire for reinforcement, and the change to fiber
        would have meant changing machinery at the tire
        plants. So we expanded our research for new
        end-use applications, and we now have more than
        200 end-use applications for Kevlar.
    

[http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americ...](http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanheritage.com%2Farticles%2Fmagazine%2Fit%2F2003%2F3%2F2003_3_60.shtml&date=2009-05-24)

~~~
resoluteteeth
Incidentally, the use of Kevlar may not have caught on for cars, but it's
pretty common in bicycle tires, so it has in some sense succeeded in the
original intended application in the end as well.

~~~
hga
I think its use in tires is a lot more common now that radials have replaced
the bias-ply tires that were most commonly used when Kevlar was invented. The
latter are good for bad roads, but I have the impression that they're not
particular about the reinforcing material they use. A material science
engineer who worked at a DuPont nylon plant in the '80s mentioned that nylon
was used for bias-ply tires for mostly Third World markets.

Goodyear, at least, seems to make a number of models with Kevlar:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=kevlar+radial+tire](https://www.google.com/search?q=kevlar+radial+tire)

But of course Kevlar is a trademark of DuPont, general patents on it have long
expired. A more general search
[https://www.google.com/search?q=aramid+radial+tire](https://www.google.com/search?q=aramid+radial+tire)
using aramid instead of Kevlar is also fruitful, especially this 1974 story
[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cen-v052n008.p007a](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cen-v052n008.p007a)
about Goodyear entering the market with them. That's very well timed, less
than half a year after the 1973 oil shock, when fuel efficiency became a very
big thing. No doubt they were working on such tires, and the shock provided a
perfect marketing opportunity, in addition to the other benefits Kevlar
brought to the table.

"Steel belted" is a phrase that I'm sure is hard to market against, as I
recall it was used a lot in the '70s....

------
dnautics
I have always put Stephanie Kwolek on my "long odds but beyond deserving" list
for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Alas, she never won it.

------
aperrien
I would not be around mucking with code today if not for this woman's work.
May she rest in peace.

~~~
JoshTriplett
That sounds like an interesting story; would you consider telling it?

------
noja
Ironically he was stabbed to death while wearing a kevlar vest.

~~~
taspeotis

        noja 4 hours ago | link | parent | flag
        Ironically he was stabbed to death while wearing a kevlar vest.
    

You need to work on your reading comprehension:

    
    
        Stephanie L. Kwolek
        Stephanie L.
        Stephanie
    

Stephanie is literally the first word in the title and article.

~~~
DanBC
Both men and women are called "Stephanie", although in the US it is mostly a
female name.

[http://www.babynames.it/boyname/Stephanie-
meaning.htm](http://www.babynames.it/boyname/Stephanie-meaning.htm)

The mistake was to assume a male. It doesn't matter what the name was.

~~~
taspeotis
That pages looks auto-generated and awfully spammy. Apparently Elizabeth is a
boys name, too [1].

[1] [http://www.babynames.it/boyname/Elizabeth-
meaning.htm](http://www.babynames.it/boyname/Elizabeth-meaning.htm)

~~~
DanBC
Here's a less spammy site.

[http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1890s.html](http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1890s.html)

I don't see what the problem is. "Elizabeth" is a boys name for a tiny number
of boys. Both sites mention the tiny number and the old dates, clearly.

(This is one of the things Google fails at, I think. "Stephanie" is unlikely
to be a name for a man i. english speaking nations, but Google pretty much
only returns me English results. Perhaps they need a switch to "allow whole
world www results" rather than locking me out of all those other languages.

~~~
taspeotis
That page doesn't load for me but I take it on face value that what you say is
there.

I personally feel it's more likely that Elizabeth is universally a girl's name
and data from the 1890's is not inputted into electronic systems with 100%
accuracy.

