Polyethylene

Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson's waxy solid, ICI Winnington, England, March 1933 The two ICI chemists were pushing ethylene and benzaldehyde together at very high pressure, looking for new reactions rather than a plastic. On March 27 they found a waxy solid in the vessel: polymerized ethylene. Nobody could repeat it reliably until the missing ingredient turned out to be a trace of oxygen in the ethylene, a narrow margin, since too much made the mixture explode. Full-scale production began on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, and polyethylene transformed the design and installation of airborne radar during the war. Today it is the most common thermoplastic in the world, in everything from shopping bags to pipes.