Carl “Speed” Marvel, bird-watching at Ocean City, Maryland, 4 May 1975. Carl Marvel Archives, CHF Collections. Carl Shipp Marvel (1894–1988) Carl Marvel earned the nickname "Speed" from his habit of rushing to breakfast after studying all night when he was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. His studies were interrupted by World War I. During the war, he worked under Professor Roger Adams in a lab set up at the university to make fine chemicals that had, until then, been imported from Germany. Marvel was a close associate of Wallace Carothers, who was a fellow student at Illinois, and he later worked with Carothers as a consultant for DuPont when Carothers was carrying out his groundbreaking work on nylon and step-growth polymerization. Marvel showed that vinyl monomers tend to add to the growing polymer in a head-to-head fashion, and he participated heavily in the U.S. synthetic rubber program when supplies of natural rubber were disrupted during World War II. After the war, he developed polybenzimidazoles, temperature-resistant polymers that are used in the aerospace industry and as a replacement for asbestos.