This episode is devoted to plastics invented or commercialized in the 1950s. Our first stop is carbon fibers, which started with Joseph Swan in the 19th century, but came of age in the late 1950s with Roger Bacon. Polyurethanes were finally commercialized in the early 1950s by B.F. Goodrich and Baeyer. Polyimides, though invented in 1908, weren't sold as products till the DuPont version, Kapton, in the 1950s. Poly(vinyl)alcohols came of age in 1950s as well, first by Japanese firm Kuraray in 1950, and now are ubiquitous in our society. Acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene, or ABS, and similar copolymers, are also well-known from the 1950s onward--including the famous LEGO block. Spandex, or elastane, from DuPont in the 1950s, is popular in clothing as an improvement to latex rubber. Polycarbonate, first created in 1898, re-emerged in the 1950s jointly by General Electric and Baeyer. Polyacetals, from DuPont in the 1950s, are now found in kitchenware, car parts, and medical devices. Fluoroelastomers, elastic molecules with fluorine atoms, also date from the 1950s.

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