The boundary: Notre Dame's inventions, and Julius Nieuwland named once

1904–1932 · THE UNIVERSITY'S RECORD BELONGS TO THE TECHNOLOGY SECTION

The boundary stated: The University of Notre Dame stands on unincorporated ground at the city's edge — the Notre Dame section of this history carries its founding and course — and its inventive record, a century of laboratory work by its faculty, belongs by this history's own division of labor to the Technology section, where it will be worked at full depth. It is named here once, at the scale one man compels, because that man is also this city's: Julius Arthur Nieuwland, born in Belgium in 1878, brought by his family to South Bend in 1880, educated at Notre Dame — a South Bend-raised man before he was a Notre Dame professor. In his Notre Dame laboratory in 1920, Nieuwland polymerized acetylene over a cuprous chloride catalyst into divinylacetylene, and presented the work at the December 1925 symposium at Rochester; DuPont's research director Elmer Bolton heard in it the road to synthetic rubber, Nieuwland shared his results with DuPont's team, and Wallace Carothers and Arnold Collins there modified the polymerization to monovinylacetylene and thence to chloroprene — neoprene, the first commercially successful synthetic rubber, announced 2 November 1931 and marketed from 1932 as Duprene.

Notre Dame's own chemistry department calls Nieuwland "one of the inventors of the original synthetic rubber," and the attribution is printed at exactly that care: the polymerization was his, at Notre Dame; the rubber was finished at DuPont, by DuPont men building on his publication and his counsel. His earlier work cuts the other way: his 1904 doctoral research on acetylene and arsenic trichloride produced the reaction from which W. Lee Lewis developed the war gas lewisite — Nieuwland, a Holy Cross priest, never pursued the application and is reported to have been sickened by what his reaction became. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1996, the only Catholic priest so honored on the record of his biographies. The rest of the university's inventors — and Messrs. Collins's and Carothers's employer's other South Bend connections — wait for the Technology section, which owns them; this entry exists so that the one towering case is neither duplicated nor lost between the two.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry — "The Nieuwland Archives": the Belgian birth (14 February 1878), the family's emigration to South Bend in 1880, the 1899 graduation, the professorship of 1918–36, the 1920 acetylene polymerization, and "one of the inventors of the original synthetic rubber."
2. The Chemical Heritage / Science History Institute acid-rain and Carothers record, and The New York Times, 11 June 1936 — the December 1925 Rochester paper, Bolton, the DuPont collaboration, and the announcement of the synthetic rubber on 2 November 1931; the 1904 thesis reaction and its issue in lewisite under W. Lee Lewis.
3. The Nieuwland biographical record (National Inventors Hall of Fame induction, 1996, via the standard biographies) — induction and the priest-inventor distinction.