Question

-------- is the first artificial fibre synthesized by human beings.

Answer 1

Hint: There are a lot of artificial fibres available nowadays but some are not pure synthetic. For example –rayon and acetate, being made from wood. There is a well known fibre called nylon which is ‘fully synthetic’ and was discovered in the early 1930s.

Complete step by step answer:
Synthetic or artificial fibres are the fibres which are made by human beings in the laboratory through chemical synthesis. They are opposite of natural fibres which are obtained from living sources. Artificial fibres are created by a process called polymerisation which involves the combining of chains of monomers together to form a polymer.
The first synthetic fibre was ‘Glass’, invented by Joseph Swan in the early 1880s. But today glass would be called semi synthetic in a precise manner because he obtained it from a cellulose liquid, which he formed chemically by modifying the fibre contained in tea tree bark.
Later in the 1930s, nylon was developed by Wallace Carothers, an American researcher at the chemical firm DuPont. It was the ’first fully synthetic fibre’ in true manner. Soon, nylon replaced silk in the United States.
Nylon is a thermoplastic silky material that can be melted, cooled and then processed into fibres, films or shapes. This process is reversible too. Nylon are the polymers processing amide linkages and are important examples of synthetic or artificial fibres. The general method of preparation includes condensation polymerisation of diamines with dicarboxylic acids and also of amines with lactams.
So, the answer to the given question is nylon.

Note: Nylon was also the first commercially successful thermoplastic polymer. There are generally two preparations of nylon :
1) Nylon 6,6 – It is used in making sheets , bristles for brushes and in the textile industry.
2) Nylon 6 – It is used for the manufacture of tyre cords, fabrics and ropes.