Hilaire de Chardonnet

Who was Hilaire de Chardonnet?

Hilaire de Chardonnet, born Louis-Marie Hilaire Bernigaud de Chardonnet, was a French engineer and industrialist from Besançon, inventor of artificial silk.

In the late 1870s, Chardonnet was working with Louis Pasteur on a remedy to the epidemic that was destroying French silk worms. Failure to clean up a spill in the darkroom resulted in Chardonnet's discovery of nitrocellulose as a potential replacement for real silk. Realizing the value of such a discovery, Chardonnet began to develop his new product.

He called his new invention "Chardonnet silk" and displayed it in the Paris Exhibition of 1889. Unfortunately, Chardonnet's material was extremely flammable, and was subsequently replaced with other, more stable materials.

He was the first one to patent the artificial silk but Georges Audemars invented a variety called Rayon in 1855.