The dangerous, flammable origins of the world's first man-made fiber
Before it was the soft, versatile fabric in your wardrobe, rayon was a highly flammable, explosive substance. Born from a quest to replicate silk, the history of this semi-synthetic marvel is a saga of chemical breakthroughs, industrial patents, and a persistent struggle to balance cost with environmental safety.
The journey of rayon began in the late 19th century as a search for an 'artificial silk.' Early attempts, such as those by Louis Marie Hilaire Bernigaud in 1884, utilized nitrocellulose. This process involved treating cotton cellulose with sulfuric and nitric acids, creating a material that was notoriously unstable and highly flammable. While French industrialist Hilaire de Chardonnet—often called the 'father of rayon'—successfully commercialized nitrocellulose rayon in 1885, the process was slow, expensive, and dangerous.
The industry eventually pivoted to more stable, regenerated cellulose methods. The cuprammonium process, based on Matthias Eduard Schweizer’s 1857 discovery that cellulose dissolves in copper salts and ammonia, was an early alternative. However, the most dominant method became the viscose process. Developed in 1891 by British chemists Charles Frederick Cross, Edward John Bevan, and Clayton Beadle, this method involves dissolving cellulose in an alkali and carbon disulfide to create a viscous solution. By 1905, the UK company Courtaulds Fibres began commercial production, and by the 1920s, the United States had become the world's largest producer.
Modern innovation focuses on the Lyocell process, developed in the late 1970s by researchers at American Enka. Unlike the viscose method, which relies on neurotoxic carbon disulfide and generates contaminated wastewater, Lyocell uses a solvent called NMMO. While more environmentally friendly, Lyocell remains more expensive to produce than the traditional viscose method. Today, the industry remains a balance of these competing technologies: the widespread, cost-effective, but chemically intensive viscose, and the cleaner, more premium Lyocell, famously known under the brand name Tencel.
Source: Rayon
