Hi hi,

Today’s Fem Friday is all about tough things. Tough things in the materials science sense, not in the difficult things happening sense, although if there is a groundswell of demand for a newsletter on the Bigger Issues I can definitely do that.

We start with the woman who invented Kevlar and thereby saved thousands of lives:

Ms. Kwolek’s peers suggested that the polymer she had concocted would probably not work as a fiber. But Ms. Kwolek persisted. She persuaded another scientist to “spin” the liquid in the laboratory spinneret, a machine used to remove liquid solvent and leave behind fibers. In “a case of serendipity,” as she put it, she discovered that polyamide molecules in the solution, a form of liquid crystal, lined up in parallel and that when the liquid was “cold spun,” it produced a fiber of unusual stiffness. When the fibers were tested in 1965, they were found to be five times as strong as steel of equal weight and resistant to fire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/business/stephanie-l-kwolek-inventor-of-kevlar-is-dead-at-90.html?_r=1

You know what else is hard? Diamonds. Enjoy this article about the women who made diamonds cool and desirable in the 1950s:

Ms. Dignam was busy making sure average consumers saw diamonds everywhere. Her theory was that “the big ones sell the little ones.” Capitalizing on the country’s newest obsession, she wrote a monthly letter to newspapers describing the diamond jewelry worn by Hollywood actresses. She sometimes appeared as a guest columnist on the women’s pages, writing under the name Diamond Dot Dignam. (“Jimmy Durante’s valentine to his dream girl, Margie Little, was an eye-opening diamond ring. Rosalind Russell wears only two costumes in ‘The Guilt of Janet Ames,’ but one of them consists of three and three quarters pounds of diamonds and only two and a half pounds of foaming tulle and net and sequins.”)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/fashion/weddings/how-americans-learned-to-love-diamonds.html

Happy Friday!

Alex.