Shadows of the Future

Abstract

As a result of the trail-and-error process by which new products elbow their way into some fields, are weeded out of other fields and capture unoccupied territory, the older plastics and other materials eventually made room for the newcomers whose births we have attended. New technologies (e.g. fibre making by slitting and stretching film), new products (e.g. biaxially oriented film) and new uses (e.g. outdoor-indoor carpeting) aided the young family of ‘stereopolymers’ to achieve that unprecedented growth rate that seems destined to make them the dominant class on the plastics scene*.

What had exclusively been in the power of Nature, namely to join the monomeric units in a giant molecule with a predetermined steric order and not at random, is now possible also for man. He has even created types of macromolecular structure that do not exist in nature.−Giulio Natta