Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014) used her creativity in chemistry to create something miraculous. Her discovery has saved thousands of lives and without her innovation, everything from drumheads to bridges to body-armor wouldn’t be the same as we know them today.
Special thanks to LinkedIn as our exclusive Women's History Month sponsor on Womanica. Join the conversation happening around the world, as LinkedIn members are redefining what it means to be a professional in today's work environment.
History classes can get a bad wrap, and sometimes for good reason. When we were students, we couldn’t help wondering... where were all the ladies at? Why were so many incredible stories missing from the typical curriculum? Enter, Womanica. On this Wonder Media Network podcast we explore the lives of inspiring women in history you may not know about, but definitely should.
Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know–but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Educators, Villains, Indigenous Storytellers, Activists, and many more. Womanica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures.
Womanica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Liz Smith, Grace Lynch, Maddy Foley, Brittany Martinez, Edie Allard, Lindsey Kratochwill, Adesuwa Agbonile, Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Taylor Williamson, and Ale Tejeda. Special thanks to Shira Atkins.
Original theme music composed by Miles Moran.
We are offering free ad space on Wonder Media Network shows to organizations working towards social justice. For more information, please email Jenny at pod@wondermedianetwork.com.
Follow Wonder Media Network:
To take the Womanica listener survey, please visit: https://wondermedianetwork.com/survey
This month of Womanica is brought to you by LinkedIn. What does it mean to you to be professional? On LinkedIn, important conversations are happening around what that word means and how it's changing as we rethink when, where, and how we work. LinkedIn members are talking about things like needing more flexibility and taking time away from work to focus on family or mental health. Those things should not stunt career development and growth. Instead, the workplace will be better when we show up on our own terms. Professional is ours to define, and our authentic selves are our professional selves. Post your truth, show the world the authentic professional you and join the conversations redefining professional on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Welcome professionals. Hey listeners, it's Jenny with another podcast. I think you'll love. TED talks daily every weekday. You'll hear new ideas on every topic imaginable, from artificial intelligence to how the war in Ukraine can change everything. One episode in particular that I thought you'd really like is the recent talk from creator, comedian and actress Lily Sing. Lily gets into how women and girls are conditioned to believe success is a seat at the table, when really we should build a better table. She's hilarious and not only shares intimate experiences from her career, but also offers ways we can build a more inclusive society where girls are encouraged and empowered to do great things. Stick around to hear part of her talk, or head over to TED Talks Daily from the Ted Audio Collective wherever you listen. Hello from Wanda Media Network. I'm Elsima Jimbo and this is Romanica today's innovator. Use her creativity in chemistry to create something miraculous. Her discovery has saved thousands of lives, and without her invention, everything from drumheads to bridge to body arma wouldn't be the same as we know them today. Please welcome the brilliant Stephanie Hullack. Stephanie Kulak was born in nineteen twenty three in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, to Polish immigrants. She was a creative child with a variety of interest. Her father was an amateur naturalist. Together they'd explore the woods near their house and gather flowers and leaves for Stephanie's scrapbook. Stephanie's mother inspired her to mimic sewing patterns and design costumes for her paper. Dolls. Tragically, Stephanie's father passed away when she was ten years old. Her mother had to search for work while Stephanie looked after her younger brother. When it came time for Stephanie to choose a career, she initially thought she would become a fashion designer, but her mother told her she was too much of a perfectionist to go into that field, so instead, she set her side on becoming a physician. Stephanie attended Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, a women's college that later became part of Carnegie Melon University, and started chemistry. After earning her degree, she couldn't afford to go to medical school wide away, so she decided to put her chemistry degree to use an interview for a job at Dupon. Stephanie didn't plan on working in chemistry at all, but she was so fascinated by the job that she ended up staying with Dupon for over forty years. She walked in a lab searching for ways to create polymers, developing new innovative materials. Decades into her career, Duponment asked Stephanie with searching for a new family of lightweight synthetic fibers that could with stand extreme conditions. The job involved dissolving fibers called polyamides into a viscous liquid. Polyamides can occur in nature in material like wool and silk, but Stephanie walked with artificial versions to create materials like nylon. The polyamide solution would then be spun around in a machine to create usable fibers, almost like a spinning wheel creating thread. However, most of this liquids had to be melted at nearly four hundred degrees in order to be spun into fibers, a process that weakened the material. Stephanie needed to find something that would melt at a lower temperature. Then one day she made a surprising discovery. Under certain conditions, the polyamides lined up just right where the molecules arranged in long, tough chains. The resulting liquid was thin and milky and not at all like the clear and syrupy liquid the lap typically worked with. Stephanie wanted to spin this new liquid into fibers with a hunch that the strong molecule chains would be exactly what the team was looking for, But her colleagues that random machine were suspicious that this unknown material would break it. Stephanie insisted, and finally they're agreed to run her experiment to everyone's shop. It worked. The resulting fiber was lighter than fiber glass, stronger than still, and resistant to high heat. Stephanie thought the results might have been a fluke at first, She waited until her evidence was all right before she told management. As soon as she did, DuPont assigned a full team to work with what she had created. Soon this material was refined into one of the most useful and widely used substances of Coverler. You can find Coverla and sneakers, snare drums, undersea cables, bridges, frying pants, canoes, robes, bulletproof vests, body emma and more. There are countless users, and its lighted strength has saved thousands of lives. Coverla made DuPont billions of dollars, but Stephanie never saw any of that money. She had signed away the patentralities to the company. Dupon awarded Stephanie with the Lavasia Medal, an award for outstanding contributions to the company. She is the only woman to receive the honor. Stephanie and many other recognitions for a high incredible discovery, including induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in nineteen ninety four, the National Medal of Technology in nineteen ninety six, the Parking Medal from the Society of Chemical Industry in nineteen ninety seven, and the induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame in two thousand and three. In nineteen eighty six, Stephanie retired from Dupoe. In retirement, she continued consulting for the company and served on academic committees like the National Academy of Sciences. She also tutored high schoolers and chemistry and became an advocate for women in science. Stephanie lived in Delaware until she passed away in twenty fourteen at age ninety all months we are highlighting innovators. For more information and pictures of some of the work we're talking about, find us on Facebook and Instagram at Womanica podcast special thanks to co creators Journey and LEAs Kaplan, who asked me to guess her talk to you tomorrow. You see, my goal was always a seat at the table. It's what women are conditioned to believe success is. And when the chair doesn't fit, when it doesn't reach the table when it's wobbly, when it's full of splinters. We don't have the luxury of fixing it or finding another one, but we try anyways. We take on that responsibility and we shoulder that burden. Now, I've been fortunate enough to sit at the few seats at a few different tables, and what I've learned is when you get the seat, trying to fix the seat won't fix the problem. Why because the table was never built for us in the first place. The solution build better tables. So allow me to be your very own IKEA manual. I would like to present to you a set of guidelines I very eloquently call how to build a table that doesn't suck. I've been told I'm very literal. Now, right off the bat, let me tell you this assembly is going to take more than one person or group of people. It's gonna take everyone. Are you ready? Should we dive in? Let's do it up first. Don't weaponize gratitude. Now, don't get me wrong. Gratitude is a great word. It's nice, it's fluffy, a solid eleven points in scrabble. Okay, However, let's be clear, although gratitude feels warm and fuzzy. It's not a form of currency. Women are assigned ten percent more work and spend more time on unrewarded, unrecognized, and non promotable tasks. Basically, what this means is all the things men don't want to do are being handed to women, and a lot of those things largely include things that advance inclusivity, equity, and diversity in the workplace. So hear me when I say a woman shouldn't be grateful to say at a table, she should be paid to sit at a table, especially once she largely helped build. And a woman's seat shouldn't be threatened if she doesn't seem grateful enough. In other words, corporations, this step involves a woman doing a job and being paid in money, opportunity, and promotion, not just gratitude. And women, now go ahead, live it up. Do you live in life? And women a moment of real talks. Trusts me. I've been there, and I notice so tough, but we have to understand and remember that being grateful and being treated fairly are not mutually exclusive. I can be grateful but still know exactly what I deserve, and that's the way to do it.