But even though the fruits of his research were often slow in coming, it ironically seems Carothers couldn't make a useless discovery. He had what he thought was a purely theoretical question to investigate, namely the small amount of cyclic molecules that form during a step-growth polymerization.

Edgar W. Spanagel and Julian Hill were assigned to work on this project. A series of cyclic molecules was made, and some of them had curious odors. If the molecule was made of a ring of five or six atoms, it smelled like menthol. Twelve atoms in the ring gave a camphor smell. But at fourteen or fifteen atoms in a ring, the molecules smelled like musk!

Musk is a fragrance used in many perfumes. When Hill first came home from work smelling like women's perfume, the odor made his wife Polly Butcher Hill just a bit suspicious.¹

What Carothers had hoped would be a purely academic investigation led to the first synthetic musk fragrances. DuPont sold this technology to another company who manufactured this synthetic musk and sold it to perfumers under the trade name "Astrotone".