In 1839, Charles Goodyear, an American, found that the properties of natural rubber changed obviously after being heated with sulfur, from an impractical property of low hardness, hot stickiness and cold brittleness to an elastic plastic material.
1869, American john wesley Hyatt heated the mixture of nitrocellulose, camphor and ethanol under high pressure to make the first synthetic plastic "celluloid".
1887 French count Hilaire de Scialdone spun the first rayon with nitrocellulose solution.
From 65438 to 0909, Leo Baekeland, an American, made the first fully synthetic plastic-phenolic resin by the reaction of phenol and formaldehyde.
1920, hermann Staudinger, a German, published a paper on "polymerization", pointing out that macromolecular substances are macromolecular compounds in which monomers with the same chemical structure are connected by chemical bonds through chemical reactions (polymerization), hence the term macromolecule or polymer.
1926, Swedish chemist svedberg and others designed an ultracentrifuge to measure the molecular weight of protein. It is proved that the molecular weight of polymer really ranges from tens of thousands to millions.
PVC was synthesized by American chemist Waldo Simon in 1926 and industrialized in 1927.
1930.
1932, hermann Staudinger summarized his theory of macromolecules and published an epoch-making masterpiece, Polymer Organic Compounds, which marked the establishment of polymer chemistry as a new discipline.
1935, Wallace H. Carothers of the Department of Organic Chemistry, Institute of Basic Chemistry of DuPont Company synthesized polyamide 66, namely nylon. Industrialization of nylon 1938.
1930, the Germans synthesized sodium cis-polybutadiene rubber and styrene-butadiene rubber with metal sodium as catalyst.
In 1940, the polyester fiber (PET) was synthesized by British T. R. Whinfield.
1940s, Peter Joseph William Debye invented the method of measuring polymer molecular weight by light scattering.
1948, Paul Flory established the mathematical theory of high molecular long chain structure.
In 1953, German Karl Ziegler and Italian Giulio Nata respectively synthesized polyethylene and polypropylene with metal complex catalysts.