Ira Williams (1894–1977) was an American chemist at DuPont's Jackson Laboratory in New Jersey, who in the summer of 1930, together with Wallace Carothers, Arnold Collins and F. B. Downing, made commercial Neoprene possible by producing a soft, plastic form of chloroprene that could be processed by the rubber industry. Early accounts of the development credited Julius Nieuwland with synthesizing the precursor divinylacetylene. Williams' contribution was the discovery that the rheological behavior of the product could be controlled by quenching the polymerization reaction with alcohol.
He won the 1946 Charles Goodyear Medal.
References
- Patterson, Gary (2014). Polymer Science from 1935-1953: Consolidating the Paradigm. Springer. p. 28. ISBN 9783662435366.
- Smith, John K. (1985). "Ten-Year Invention: Neoprene and Du Pont Research, 1930–1939". Technology and Culture. 26 (1): 34–55. doi:10.2307/3104528. JSTOR 3104528. S2CID 113234844.
- McHugh, F. D. (January 1932). "New Commercial Synthetic Rubber". The Scientific American Digest. Vol. 146, no. 1. Nature America, Inc. JSTOR 24965828. Retrieved 7 January 2024.
- Hounshell, David A.; Smith, John Kenly (1988). Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R and D, 1902-1980. Cambridge University Press. p. 251. ISBN 9780521327671.
- Wallace H. Carothers, Ira Williams, Arnold M. Collins, and James E. Kirby (1937). "Acetylene Polymers and their Derivatives. II. A New Synthetic Rubber: Chloroprene and its Polymers". J. Am. Chem. Soc. 53 (11): 4203–4225. doi:10.1021/ja01362a042.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - "Duprene". TIME Magazine. Vol. 18, no. 20. TIME USA, LLC. 16 November 1931. Retrieved 6 January 2024.
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