Hilaire de Chardonnet

Hilaire de Chardonnet Comte (Louis -Marie Hilaire de Chardonnet Bernigaud; born May 1, 1839 in Besançon, † March 12, 1924 in Paris) was a French chemist and industrialist and became famous for the invention of artificial silk.

Chardonnet was actually a civil engineer, but he worked for Louis Pasteur. Chardonnet was aware of studies of Pasteur, who dealt with diseases of the silkworm. Then he searched for an artificial replacement for silk, the disease could wear nothing. He examined in this context, the secretion of the silkworm and its rapid solidification to a thread. This should have brought him to the idea of natural silk to counter a manufactured on an appropriate chemically material. His starting point was mulberry leaves, the food of silkworms. He transformed them with nitric and sulfuric acid to cellulose nitrate and erspann from fibers.

Chardonnet had not only to develop a chemical process for the realization of his idea, he had to also create the conditions for a practicable machine in the production process. On 17 November 1884 he handed over its findings to the Academy of Sciences in Paris and received on 17 November of the same year the first of its 48 patents.

The original fibers were extremely flammable because of the presence in the cellulose molecule nitro groups. To solve this problem, he took over the Denitrierverfahren developed by Joseph Wilson Swan, for which reducing sulfur compounds found used. Fiber properties were but it gets serious, which was reflected in a loss of strength and elongation.

In 1889, the artificial silk was first shown at the Paris Exposition, and was at that time a sensation. It was called at that time " Chardonnet silk ". He managed this by bracing nitrate cellulose to Chardonnet silk, the first industrially produced synthetic fiber and precursor of rayon, nylon and Dacron.

Chardonnet opened factories for the production of rayon, the first thereof 1891 in his hometown of Besançon. A lasting economic success was not destined Chardonnet, its artificial silk had to make by other methods produced similar fibers. He died in 1924 penniless and largely forgotten in Paris. He had sacrificed his not inconsiderable fortune for the realization of his idea. In the year of his death had the last of the factories, who had worked for his method to be closed.

In addition, Chardonnet is a candidate for the true identity of Fulcanelli.