by Synthetic fibers or synthetic fibres (in British English; see spelling differences) are the fibers created by humans via chemical synthesis, in contrast to natural fibers directly made from living organisms such as plant fibers (like cotton) or fur from animals. They result from extensive research by scientists in order to recreate naturally occurring animal and plant fibers. Synthetic fibers are made by extruding fiber forming materials by spinning them into a fiber. These are called synthetic or synthetic fibers like Aluminium extrusion. The word polymer comes from a Greek suffix “poly” which means “many” and suffix “mer” that signifies “single unit”. (Note that each unit of a polymer can be known as”a monomer”).
The first fiber that was fully synthetic was glass. Joseph Swan invented one of the first synthetic fibers in the 1880s; today it would be called semisynthetic in precise usage. The fiber was made from a liquid of cellulose created by chemically altering the tree bark’s fiber. The fiber that was created by this process was chemically identical in its potential applications similar to carbon filaments Swan invented for its incandescent lamp, but Swan soon recognized its potential to revolutionize textile manufacturing. In 1885, he revealed the fabrics he created from his synthetic material at the International Inventions Exhibition in London.
Another step initiated by Hilaire de Chardonnet who was an French engineer and industrialist, who came up with the first synthetic silk, which he referred to as “Chardonnet silk”. In the latter half of 1870s, Chardonnet was working alongside Louis Pasteur on a remedy to the epidemic that was decimating French silkworms. Failure to clean up an accident in the darkroom resulted in Chardonnet’s discovery the nitrocellulose that could be a replacement for real silk. Conscient of the benefits of such an invention, Chardonnet began to develop his product that was displayed during the Paris Exhibition of 1889. The Chardonnet material was extremely inflammable, so it was replaced with other, more stable materials.
