Thank you Miss Kwolek. We salute you.
Thanks for posting. I saw the article and wanted to post because I was afraid it would go unnoticed. It’s hard to fathom how many lives have been saved by the everlasting technology Stephanie Kwolek created.
Sadly, many people including myself would have never known her if not for her passing.
Owe that woman my life, twice.
Kevlar has generated several billion dollars in revenue for the company. Ms. Kwolek did not directly benefit from it financially, however; she signed over patent royalties to DuPont.
Didn’t DuPont do the same thing to Roy Plunkett when he invented teflon?
It’s not just DuPont. It’s pretty much SOP that if you invent something while working @ XYZ corp they own the rights. Your name is on the patent, but they own it. Some may offer cash rewards for patents and such as a means to generate more IP, but very few if any will give the inventor the rights.
Yep. I started to get fired up about that… but it’s the nature of the beast. Their labs/equipment, etc.
Meanwhile the inventor of the pet rock is a millionaire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Dahl_(pet_rocks)#The_Pet_Rock
Totally get what you’re saying but fortunately (for Gary) he was at the bar, in his leisure time, when he dreamt up the idea of a pet rock. Had Miss Kwolek thought of Kevlar while also sitting in the tavern, she too would be a gazilionaire. That’s the way it goes when companies hire smart people to dream up shit to make them money while on their watch.
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That’s the reality. I half suspect Stephanie Kwolek got more actual reward from lives saved than she would a giant payoff. Some people just tend to be that way. They would certainly enjoy being millionaires but if give the choice would still opt to invent something that saves lives.
I owe my life to Kevlar 129.
Totally agree.
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I agree she may have not wanted to profit from her research even if she could have. I suspect, at least in the beginning, she didn’t even know the eventual outcome of discovering Kevlar and it becoming a life saving material.
As bad as work product agreements seem, she probably needed lab equipment that she didn’t have lying around in her basement and surely couldn’t afford.