Carothers journey to DuPont began many years earlier in his midwestern childhood. He was born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1896 and raised in Des Moines. As a boy he was always interested in technical things, like building radio sets for other neighborhood kids. However, his family never planned for him to become a scientist. His father was a teacher at a business school in Des Moines, and Carothers was sent to study business at Tarkio College in Tarkio, Missouri. Away from his father's watchful eyes, he began studying chemistry as well as business.

Actually, he did more than study chemistry and business. He was capable enough to teach classes in both business and chemistry while still an undergraduate. And as if that weren't enough, he taught classes in English literature as well. Carothers always had very broad interests that were not limited to science. He had passions for music and literature, including the music of Peter Tchaikovsky and the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In the end, chemistry won out over business, and the young Carothers graduated with a degree in chemistry. He went onto earn a master's degree and a doctorate at the University of Illinois. He then joined the faculty of Harvard University and taught chemistry for a few semesters. But he never really liked teaching. It wasn't long before DuPont was able to convince him to leave Harvard and come work at its laboratories in Wilmington, Delaware. DuPont was just as interested in cracking the puzzle of macromolecules as Carothers was, because the company felt lots of money could be made in new synthetic plastics and other materials.

It was important to Carothers to prove that polymers were macromolecules. The fact that he happened to invent a wonderful material called nylon in the process didn't matter nearly as much to him.

Carothers died in 1937 at the young age of forty-one. Tragically, he suffered from clinical depression his whole life and committed suicide just two years after he invented nylon. At that time modern counseling and antidepressants did not exist. Depression was not well understood and virtually untreatable. While we can only imagine what he might have achieved had he lived longer, he still accomplished more than most people who live out their full measure of years.

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