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If you like the look and feel of real cotton but hate ironing, thank Ruth Benerito. Synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester were first invented in the 1930s and 1940s, and they made life a lot easier because they did not need to be ironed. While this was good news for anyone who had to do laundry, it was bad news for cotton farmers. Although cotton clothing might be more comfortable against the skin and might feel cooler in the summertime, ironing is a lot of work, and a lot of consumers opted for clothes made from synthetic fibers. It has been said that Benerito saved the cotton industry.
Born in 1916, Benerito grew up in New Orleans as Ruth Rogan. In an age when girls did not usually go on to higher education, her father made sure his daughters received the same education available to boys. She completed high school at age 14 and entered Tulane University at age 15. She graduated from Tulane during the Great Depression and hoped to do research, but jobs were scarce; so she taught high school in Jefferson Parish, west of New Orleans. In addition to science and math Benerito was assigned to teach driver's education, which was a challenge since she had never driven a car!
While working as a teacher, Benerito took night classes to earn her master's degree from Tulane. During World War II she taught college classes, and after the war she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago. She married Frank Benerito in 1950 and went to work at the USDA Southern Regional Research Center in New Orleans, where she spent most of her career. During the Korean War she developed a way to give fat intravenously to patients who were too sick to eat—a method used to feed seriously wounded soldiers.
So how did Benerito turn cotton into a modern easy-care fabric? She used a process called crosslinking. To understand what crosslinking is, it helps to know a little something about the molecules that make up cotton. Cotton is composed of a material called cellulose. Like synthetic nylon and polyester fibers, cellulose is a polymer; that is, its molecules are shaped like long chains containing many thousands of atoms. The long, chainlike shape of the molecules is what makes cellulose, like nylon and polyester, a good fiber. Benerito discovered a way to treat cotton fibers so that the chainlike cellulose molecules were joined together chemically. This is crosslinking, and it makes cotton resistant to wrinkling.
It was first thought that crosslinking was making the cotton fabric wrinkle resistant by strengthening its fibers, but the amount of crosslinking used in Benerito's treatment is small and does not add much strength. Benerito developed a new theory on how crosslinking works. We know cellulose molecules can stick to each other by means of the weak forces between molecules known as hydrogen bonds. Benerito proposed that one side effect of her crosslinking process was the strengthening of the hydrogen bonds, which made the material resistant to wrinkling.
In later years, while she was researching cotton fibers, Benerito taught classes part-time at Tulane University and at the University of New Orleans. She retired from the USDA in 1986 but continued teaching until 1997. In 2002, at the age of 86, she received the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for her work on textiles and her commitment to education.
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