Name John Whinfield | ||
Died 1966, Dorking, United Kingdom Education Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge | ||
John Rex Whinfield CBE (16 February 1901 in Sutton, Surrey, England – 6 July 1966 in Dorking, Surrey) was a British chemist who, together with James Tennant Dickson investigated polyesters and in 1941 produced and patented the first polyester fibre which they named Terylene, also known as Dacron, equal to or surpassing nylon in toughness and resilience. He was born in Accrington but later moved out of town before the age of 4
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Education
Whinfield attended Merchant Taylors' School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where he read natural sciences (1921) and chemistry (1922).
Career
He worked initially as an assistant to Charles Frederick Cross and Edward John Bevan who had done earlier work on viscose rayon in 1892. In 1924 he was employed as a research chemist by the Calico Printers' Association based in Manchester.
During the late 1930s, the hunt was on for new synthetic fibres to rival Wallace H. Carothers' nylon. Whinfield and his assistant James Tennant Dickson investigated other types of polymers with textile fibre potential. Whinfield and Dickson discovered how to condense terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol to yield a new polymer which could be drawn into a fibre. Whinfield and Dickson patented their invention in July 1941, but due to wartime secrecy restrictions it was not made public until 1946. ICI (Terylene) and DuPont (Dacron) went on to produce their own versions of the fibre.
Whinfield served as an assistant director of chemical research in the Ministry of Supply during World War II. In 1947 he joined ICI.
The library in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York is named in memory of Whinfield.