It’s hard to quantify just how many lives have been saved and injuries prevented by high-strength industrial fibres. In 1965, Stephanie Kwolek’s extraordinary hard work paid her back with the serendipitous discovery of a new type of material, whose simultaneous strength, lightness and stiffness gave it boundless possibilities for use in a range of products that would transform industries and improve countless lives. You may well have heard of the most famous of them – Kevlar® – for its use in bulletproof vests, helmets, fighter jets, Formula 1 cars, fireproof suits, tyres and many other products.

Kwolek was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When she was ten years old, her father passed away but his passion for the natural sciences lived on in his daughter. She studied chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, graduating aged 23. Originally set out to pursue a career in medicine, she couldn’t resist the lure of organic chemistry, sparked by her time working as a chemist with the DuPont Company, first in Buffalo, New York, then in Wilmington, Delaware. For almost two decades she became absorbed in her work with a type of chemical compound called ‘polyamides’. This involved meticulous experimentation, developing different solvents of these compounds and testing their ability to withstand high heat and pressure.

The amazing thing about her discovery in 1965 – that certain polyamides could line up in the right way to exhibit these strong and flexible characteristics – is that, on the face of it, the particular solution she’d prepared looked a hopeless case. You’d normally expect a suitable solution to look more like transparent gel, not a cloudy liquid. But Kwolek followed her instincts and tested it anyway, and realised it had potential as the basis for a series of world-changing industrial fibres.

As she was working at DuPont at the time, the company greatly benefited from her discovery, assigning teams of scientists to work on the applications of the new material, starting with tyres. Kevlar products only hit the market in 1975, and since then DuPont earned billions thanks to Kwolek and her incredible invention. Since she assigned all her patents to the company she never directly benefited from this discovery. She was nevertheless proud to be saving lives and contributing to society in a meaningful way.

This tenacious energy and her willingness never to accept defeat became one of her trademark qualities – it even saw her land her first job at DuPont when she had been told at interview to wait several weeks and instead demanded an immediate answer as she had an offer from another employer.

After her retirement in 1986, she kept consulting DuPont and received the rare distinction of being awarded, as a woman, the Perkin Medal (in 1997) and the National Medal of Technology (in 1999). She would leave a final legacy in the years before her death in 2014 in mentoring a stream of young female scientists-to-be.