Module 4 Unit 2

"My name is Anthony Willbourn and I am a chemist. I was really fortunate

to be able to meet and talk to the discoverers of polythene because many plastics, as they were developed, didn't have individuals you could point to and say, he or she was a discoverer. The discovery was made in 1933 by two men - Gibson and the other one was Eric Forsett, and he was trained as an organic chemist, and they were working in the field of the study of phenomena at high pressures.

They had no idea what they were going to find. And certainly didn't plan to

make a plastic. In fact, they were trying to react, at that very moment, ethylene

with benzaldehyde, to make a very ordinary sort of compound, ethyl phenyl ketone. But they didn't make it. They made by accident a white, waxy solid, and the other problem was that, when they tried to repeat these experiments, they didn't produce anything at all. They had explosions, because the gases decomposed explosively. And all this was being done in an open laboratory, which today would be unthinkable, because the pressures were up at about two thousand atmospheres. And they reacted at about 180 degrees centigrade.

And finally they had produced a few grams of this white waxy solid, because

it was interesting of course, they had to stop the work because it was too dangerous, and they had to wait until a special building had been completed, into which they could put this equipment and work safely.

What was basically remarkable was that they made something they didn't

expect to make. Nobody knew that you could join together these atomic components and produce molecules of such enormous lengths, which gave it not only good solid state properties, but a sort of toughness that made it possible to

make cable covering, and to make films and so on.

The first plant which had a capacity of only making pounds per day came

into operation in September 1939, the day the war broke out. And that was very significant, because within several months it became clear that polythene was the ideal material for making radar and using it from aircraft, which had been impossible before polythene became available. The RAF, which was of course heavily outnumbered by the Luftwaffe, couldn't stay in the air long enough to find the enemy and engage them without some help. And radar provided that essential help that made it possible for the RAF to contain the attacks of the enemy.

So of course polythene had a tremendous practical effect on the war effort."

(Abriged and dapted from http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/mycentury/transcript/wk37d2.shtml)

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