Humanity has a long history of trying to understand the substance and structure of the physical world around us, whether by simple observation or experimental manipulation. In ancient Greece, for example, Aristotle concluded that all materials were made up of combinations of only four elements: air, earth, fire, and water. During the Middle Ages, alchemists tried in vain to convert common metals into gold. By the late eighteenth century, chemists had begun synthesizing and breaking down chemicals in an effort to determine their fundamental components. Early in the nineteenth century, English chemist John Dalton, observing that chemicals would combine only in specific ratios, concluded that matter was made of indivisible "atoms" (a concept first proposed by the Greek philosopher Democritus in about 400 BC). Nineteenth-century chemists also determined that it was possible to synthesize so-called organic compounds, once believed to be made only in living organisms, from inorganic chemicals.

Even as chemists pursued their investigations into the nature of nature, inventors were creating new materials by treating natural substances with various chemicals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In 1839, American inventor Charles Goodyear discovered a technique, which he called vulcanization, for manipulating the properties of the sap from rubber trees by treating it with heat and sulfur. The process converted a gummy, springy material used mainly to erase ("rub out") into a dry, tough, elastic material that would make automobile tires possible--and eventually a transportation revolution.

Investigators working at the theoretical level were equally productive, arriving at a series of independent realizations that would eventually lay the foundation for the polymer industry. In 1858, German chemist Friedrich Kekulé developed the framework for understanding the structure of organic molecules when he showed that a carbon atom can form chemical bonds with up to four other atoms and that multiple carbon atoms can join together to create long chains--a discovery also made at about the same time by Scottish chemist Archibald S. Couper. Then, in 1874, Jacobus van't Hoff of the Netherlands and Joseph Le Bel of France independently suggested that the carbon atom's four bonds are arranged so that they point at the corners of a tetrahedron, or pyramid. Since carbon atoms are the framework for natural and artificial polymers, the two discoveries would in time furnish a three-dimensional picture of the molecular structure of polymers.