Talk:Stephanie Kwolek

Overall Page Changes

Stephanie Kwolek made huge contributions in the discovery of Kevlar and had great success as a female scientist, but her page lacks many details about her and her work. First off, at the introduction paragraph, I would like to propose the addition of “She served as a mentor for other women scientists as well as worked in programs that introduced young children to science.”

I would like to propose a few additions to her “Early life and education” section. First, the description of the time spent with her father as a child is lacking in details. I propose the change “Kwolek spent many hours with him exploring the natural world around her home, creating scrapbooks with leaves, wildflowers, seeds, and grasses and writing pertinent descriptions for everything inside.” Second, I propose the addition of “the women’s college part” before “of Carnegie Mellon University.” I think this is an important distinction, especially from a WGS scholar’s perspective.

Under the DuPont career section, the first sentence makes it seem like she did not apply for other jobs, but the subsequent sentence about getting the job shows she did apply other places since she needed to respond to another offer. I propose the addition of “She applied for a chemist position with DuPont and other places as well.” At DuPont, Kwolek did not just work on the Kevlar project, but she also worked on other projects. Before the Kevlar section, I propose an additional statement about her work at DuPont- “She worked on several projects, including a search for new polymers and a search for a lower temperature condensation process.”

I think there need to be more photos of her throughout her career instead of the single photo on the side.

Finally, under the “Awards and honors section,” a few additional details need to be added to the award description. For the National Inventors Hall of Fame, I propose the change and addition “Kwolek became the fourth woman, out of a total of 113 members at the time, to be added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.” I also propose the change and addition “In 1996, she received the IRA Achievement Award and the National Medal of Technology. In 1997, she received the Perkin Medal from the American Chemical Society. Both medals were honors that were rarely awarded to women.”

Information from The Chemical Heritage Foundation — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sayruhh (talk • contribs) 05:37, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

References

"Polish-American"

I am not entirely comfortable with identifying her as "Polish American" in the first sentence. She is famous for her work as an industrial chemist; of what conceivable relevance is the country where her parents (or grandparents, or great-grandparents) were born? Uucp 17:34, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

My thought is that if someone wanted to bother, they could research whether she has any known identification with Poland in the familial/ethnic sense, and go from there as to whether to note her family's origin in Poland. --P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 19:52, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Per WP:MOSBIO trying to use only American for true Americans. Ethnicity should be discussed further into article unless it is specifically what makes them notable. --Tom 14:03, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Spinneret

A spinneret is not as was previously stated "a machine for testing the fiber strength". See footnote #2 ((was already) in the article). It's just a device for spinning synthetic fibers. "When the cloudy solution was "spun" — forced through the tiny holes of a device called a spinneret"

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.178.146.110 (talk) 12:08, 1 June 2009 (UTC) 

Ah, I see. Thank you for correcting that; I hadn't known it before. NW (Talk) ^{(How am I doing?)} 18:07, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I hope that you have noticed and you have not yet fixed it, Charles Smullen did not persuade Stephanie Kwolek to run her fiber it was the other way around. Smullen thought that the liquid crystals were solid and would clog up the microscopic holes in the spinneret.--Zaka159 (talk) 23:04, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Sentence for deletion

I would like to propose the sentence "However, Kwolek was not very involved in developing the applications of Kevlar" as a candidate for deletion. The source for the sentence is Kevlar's inventor herself, who when asked by an interviewer "Were you involved in finding those applications?" replied "I was not much involved."

First, isn't it a violation of NPOV to source a product's inventor on matters such as role?

Second, given the vast range of applications of Kevlar, how could she have answered differently?

Third, in the interview she went on to calibrate "not much" as follows. "At the very beginning of the project I did supply a small amount of fiber to one of our scientists who was experimenting with materials for bullet-resistant vests. He wove some fabric from this fiber and subjected it to fired bullets. The results of the preliminary tests were very favorable and gave us immediate hope."

This sounds like a reasonably modest way of saying she was a founding member of the team that developed the Kevlar bullet-proof vest (note the "us" at the end). In particular she did not say "One of the bullet-resistant vest scientists suggested this application to me," and if, as seems likely under the circumstances, she had been the one taking the initiative in seeking out that scientist, it would be very unfair to imply that she wasn't "involved in developing those applications," which is how the statement comes across in the article. Even the USPTO would take this as prima facie evidence of the inventor finding an application for Kevlar (and one that is still important today). --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 05:20, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Just noticed another detail: the "those" in the interviewer's question "Were you involved in finding those applications?" was in reference to Kwolek's immediately preceding statement, "So we expanded our research for new end-use applications, and we now have more than 200 end-use applications for Kevlar." Of course she wasn't "much involved," to have said otherwise would be like the Wright brothers claiming they were "much involved" in the development of all the applications of the airplane, an impossibility. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 05:33, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

NPOV refers to your (or the editors to be exact) POV, not those of the person being written about. Views of the subject may be vitally important and featured in the article. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s views on civil rights are clearly important in any article on the man. Your opinion of Mr. King's views on civil rights are, on the other hand, NPOV if included in the article.

The second is speculation. She could have answered an infinity of different ways. She could have taken credit for everything. Or she could have denied it - which she did.

The last statement is simply an invention of your own. In my reading of the statement, "us" refers to "DuPont". The addition follows the same pattern, you're reading a lot into the words, "us" and "we".

Generally the claims you make are what are known as SYN. That is, you are taking the words someone wrote (spoke, etc.) and using them to construct a position that those words do not actually state. The sources in this case actually state that she was not involved in the practical developments. Period. If you want to include the claim that she was directly involved in the development of the bulletproof vest, you're going to have to find an RS that states she was directly involved in the development of the bulletproof vest. You can't infer things, the wiki isn't a debating society.

One can often spot SYN by looking for weasel words and rhetorical questions. "how could she have answered differently?" is a classic example, as is "This sounds like". Another common approach is to make statements of fact that aren't facts. An example would be to make an imaginary claim about the USPTO to support a statement, when the opposite is easy to demonstrate.

"Just the facts, ma'am".

Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:55, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Content and Image Additions

The first piece of information I am proposing to add is in the "Retirement" section. Stephanie Kwolek continued to utilize her knowledge of chemistry after retirement. She “tutored high school students in chemistry, paying particular attention to grooming young women for work in the sciences.” [nytimes.com].

The second proposal I would like to make is in regards to the "Honors" section. In addition to many other awards already stated in the page, Kwolek also received the Lemelson M.I.T. Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999[lemelson.mit.edu], an award in which less than 100 people have received. This is the largest prize of the Lemelson Foundation in which the winner receives $500,000, making it the largest cash prize for invention in the U.S.

Finally, I would like to request the use of more images to supplement the information on Kwolek’s page. The content regarding her early life, career, and achievements provide adequate support for the fact that she made a large impact in chemistry, however there are only photos of her in the later stages of her life and none of her participating in her actual work. Adding photos of her performing lab work and/or receiving various awards will complement the information given on the page and accurately portray her as a chemist professional. In addition, it will allow users to gain a sense of what she was involved in at first glance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sayruhh (talk • contribs) 06:26, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

New Additions

I would like to propose a few new additions to the page. I would like to add a few more sentences about how she ended up working for DuPont and discovering Kevlar, the effects of the discovery for DuPont, and how she received the job offer from DuPont and held her position during a time period when the workforce was dominated by men. I would also like to add a quick paragraph of some of the variety of uses of Kevlar to add to the impact of her discovery. Finally I would like to add some more to the section about her post retirement. I would like to mention how she became involved in introducing children to scientific fields, tutored, and prepared classroom demonstrations for schools. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sew5295 (talk • contribs) 19:46, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

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