Formal Sciences & Matter / Chemistry & Materials

Macromolecules (Staudinger)

Hermann Staudinger argued in 1920 that rubber, cellulose and proteins are giant chain molecules held together by ordinary chemical bonds, which opened the way to designing plastics and fibres.

In his 1920 paper 'Über Polymerisation' Staudinger proposed that these materials are long chains of short repeating units joined by covalent bonds; Emil Fischer and Heinrich Wieland held that they were clumps of small molecules, and Wieland urged him to drop the idea. Evidence built up: his hydrogenated rubber still behaved like rubber, ultracentrifuge work showed that proteins are huge, and Herman Mark and Kurt Meyer's X-ray work in 1928 showed long covalent chains, and Staudinger received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Once chemists knew that polymers are chains, they could build them on purpose, as Wallace Carothers did with nylon and polyester in the 1930s.