Hilaire de Chardonnet
French engineer, inventor of artificial silk (1839–1924)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louis-Marie Hilaire Bernigaud de Grange, Count (Comte) de Chardonnet (1 May 1839 – 11 March 1924) was a French engineer and industrialist from Besançon, and inventor of artificial silk.
In the late 1870s, Chardonnet was working with Louis Pasteur on a remedy to the epidemic that was destroying French silkworms. Failure to clean up a spill in the darkroom resulted in Chardonnet's discovery of nitrocellulose as a potential replacement for real silk. Realizing the value of such a discovery, Chardonnet began to develop his new product.[1]
He called his new invention "Chardonnet silk" (soie de Chardonnet) and displayed it in the Paris Exhibition of 1889.[2] However, Chardonnet's material was extremely flammable, and was subsequently replaced with other, more stable materials.
He was the first to patent artificial silk, although Georges Audemars had invented a variety called rayon in 1855.
