1941 Teflon patented by Kinetic Chemicals, a partnership of General Motors and DuPont. DuPont began marketing the polymer commercially in 1944 and filed to trademark it under the name of Teflon in February 1945.
Hagley Museum and Library. On this date (February 4) in 1941, Kinetic Chemicals, Inc., a…
World War 2 Widespread use of chemicals
1945 Rachel Carson proposes to write a story on the impact of DDT on fish and wildlife to Reader’s Digest, but was turned down.
Source: Rachel Carson to Harold Lunch, July 15, 1945, Rachel Carson Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Cited in Douglas Brinkley, D. (2022). The Silent Spring Revolution, Harper Collins, New York, p. 51.
1947 DES granted FDA approval for use as a miscarriage preventative (it was used earlier than this off-label).
Smith O. W. (1948). Diethylstilbestrol in the prevention and treatment of complications of pregnancy. American journal of obstetrics and gynecology, 56(5), 821–834.
1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Paul Hermann Müller “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.”