Stephanie L. Kwolek, Inventor of Kevlar, Is Dead at 90

Have you ever worn Kevlar body armor?

The Feds have rather stupid requirements for it, that don't match the real world, but depend on deformation of clay behind a vest.

So what cops wear is stiffer, and perhaps hotter than needed. Although I think heat is unavoidable, there's even relevant lines in Shakespeare's King Henry the Fourth:

  Like a rich armour worn in heat of day,
  That scalds with safety.

So plenty of cops are killed because they're not wearing their uncomfortable armor; it's sort of like strapping a barrel around your torso.

Another factor is that better, albeit more expensive polymers have been developed, especially very long chain polyethylene (as in 1-2 million units long); my next vest will be made from that. Also Kevlar loses its protective strength if wet. There was also a short period where a very bad new polymer was used by at least one company, it quickly degraded, and that cost a few cops their lives.

Finally, while the gun-grabbers' campaign against non-existent "cop killer bullets!!!" accomplished nothing directly affecting cops on the ground, indirectly it taught a lot of people that cops wear body armor, resulting, or so I've read without personally drilling down to the raw data, an increase in criminals killing them with head shots.

Ah, I should also note that soft body armor saves by preventing penetration, and decreases kinetic impact by stretching the fibers. So a hit can still hurt a lot, enough to potentially fatally distract you during a fight, especially bad if you're alone. My home defense body armor has a hard rifle plate in the front to mitigate this.

Ah, I should also add some numbers. There aren't that many cops killed on duty, here's numbers broken down by years: http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.htm...

I don't think Kevlar body armor went into common use until perhaps the '80s, and without adding heavy rifle plates, which only SWAT teams routinely use (and our troops in the last decade), it offers very little protection against the #1 killer of cops, vehicle related accidents (in them, or struck by them).

She signed the patent royalties over to DuPont, but that is the deal that she made. There is at least an equal chance that she never would have created this material (there are scores of other men and women who have worked for DuPont, but not an equal number of such incredible breakthroughs). She traded away the ability to hit a home run for lower variance in compensation. She collected a salary, and I would hope that she indirectly financially benefited from potential promotions or raises.

Also, without the resources of DuPont she never would have been able to create this material.

It is a great invention, and she is certainly a great inventor; but just because she didn't become fabulously wealthy doesn't mean she was treated poorly.

Although that's "save from a bullet wound". Some time ago I read about a statistic that normal, street handgun rounds have about a 1 in 4 chance of killing someone hit in the torso. I'd presume since then improvements in and additional trauma centers have dropped that.

On the other hand we shouldn't denigrate the utility of preventing any bullet wound; just surviving is a low threshold, contrary to many Hollywood portrayals getting shot is a very bad thing that frequently won't result in complete return of function. I'd bet that's especially true for the torso hits normal concealable body armor stops. Not that heavier external body armor has that much greater coverage, although I'm sure there's additional saves with it.

I think its use in tires is a lot more common now that radials have replaced the bias-ply tires that were most commonly used when Kevlar was invented. The latter are good for bad roads, but I have the impression that they're not particular about the reinforcing material they use. A material science engineer who worked at a DuPont nylon plant in the '80s mentioned that nylon was used for bias-ply tires for mostly Third World markets.

Goodyear, at least, seems to make a number of models with Kevlar: https://www.google.com/search?q=kevlar+radial+tire

But of course Kevlar is a trademark of DuPont, general patents on it have long expired. A more general search https://www.google.com/search?q=aramid+radial+tire using aramid instead of Kevlar is also fruitful, especially this 1974 story http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cen-v052n008.p007a about Goodyear entering the market with them. That's very well timed, less than half a year after the 1973 oil shock, when fuel efficiency became a very big thing. No doubt they were working on such tires, and the shock provided a perfect marketing opportunity, in addition to the other benefits Kevlar brought to the table.

"Steel belted" is a phrase that I'm sure is hard to market against, as I recall it was used a lot in the '70s....

Spectra dominates most applications today, so kevlar is not used so much for ballistics vests. Additionally, the police are not the main customers, much is military. Third, kevlar is still used for cut-resistance but that will not show up in this data (nor would the military lives saved). So for these and other reasons, its intuitively correct to think that the invetion of kevlar has broadly saved more lives than what is mentioned. Or at least that would be my guess. Other people may have actual data to flesh the subject out.