Carl Shipp Marvel

Who was Carl Shipp Marvel?

Carl Shipp "Speed" Marvel was an American polymer chemist who worked at developing polybenzimidazoles, which are temperature-resistant polymers that are used in the aerospace industry and as a replacement for asbestos.

He graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1915, and was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon. He obtained the nickname "Speed" early on in his career as a chemist from his habit of rushing to breakfast after studying all night when he was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. However, his studies were interrupted by World War I and during the war he worked under Roger Adams in a lab set up at the university to make fine chemicals that had, until then, been imported from Germany, which at the time was the centre of fine chemical production. He was initiated into Alpha Chi Sigma at the Zeta Chapter, University of Illinois, in 1918.

Also at this time Marvel became a close associate of Wallace Carothers, who was a fellow student at Illinois, and whom he later worked with as a consultant for DuPont when Carothers was carrying out his groundbreaking work on nylon and step-growth polymerization.