Hilaire de Chardonnet, French Inventor
Hilaire de Chardonnet (May 1, 1839 - March 11, 1924) was a French engineer, industrialist and, the inventor of artificial silk. In the late 1870s, he was working with Louis Pasteur on a remedy to the epidemic that was destroying French silk worms. 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. He called his new invention "Chardonnet silk" and displayed it in the Paris Exhibition of 1889. Unfortunately, Chardonnet's material was extremely flammable, and was subsequently replaced with other, more stable materials. He died in 1924 at the age of 84.
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