The 1930s and the Second World War marked the transition of Acrylic Suppliers Sydney to mainstream use, especially as regards the creation of a real modern industry: oil became the raw material from which to start for production and, at the same time, they improve and adapt to the mass production the processing techniques, starting from the molding ones.
In 1935, Wallace Carothers first synthesized nylon (polyamide), a material that will spread with the war following the American troops by finding a number of applications, thanks to its characteristics that make it absolutely functional for the textile industry: from women’s stockings to parachutes, the rise of synthetic fibers begins.
Starting from the work of Carothers, Rex Whinfield and James Tennant Dickson in 1941 patented polyethylene terephthalate (PET), together with their employer, the Calico Printers’ Association of Manchester.
After the war this polyester had great success in the production of artificial textile fibers (Terylene), a sector in which it is still widely used (for example, the fabric known as pile is in PET). Its entry into the world of food packaging dates back to 1973, when Nathaniel Wyeth (Du Pont) patented the PET bottle as a container for carbonated drinks. Light, shock-resistant and transparent, the bottle invented by Wyet is today the standard for packaging mineral water and soft drinks.
The war stimulates the need to find substitutes for natural products that cannot be found, for which polyurethanes are developed to replace rubber, especially in Germany, while since 1939 the first vinyl chloride-acetate copolymers have been industrialized, developing discoveries at the beginning of the century. Since then, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) will serve, for example, for phonograph disks.
After the war, the discoveries dictated by military demands invade the civilized world. The 1950s saw the discovery of melamine-formaldehyde resins (the vast public knows them under the trade name of a specific one among them, the Fòrmica), which make it possible to produce laminates for furnishing and to print low-cost crockery. The synthetic fibers (polyester, nylon) and Acrylic Suppliers Sydney experience the first boom, a modern and practical alternative to natural ones.
Those same years are, however, above all marked by the irresistible rise of Polyethylene, which finds full success only two decades after its invention, taking advantage of its higher melting point to allow applications that were previously unthinkable.
The discovery of Giulio Natta in 1954 of the isotactic Polypropylene, crowning the studies on the ethylene polymerization catalysts that will be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1963 together with the German Karl Ziegler, who the year before had isolated the polyethylene. The Polypropylene will be produced industrially from 1957 with the Moplen brand, revolutionizing the houses of the whole world but entering above all in the Italian mythology of the economic boom.
