Chardonnet, (Louis-Marie) Hilaire Bernigaud (1839-1924)

French chemist who developed artificial silk 1883, the first artificial fibre. He also worked on cellulose nitrate. Chardonnet was born in Besançon, Franche-Comté. He trained first as a civil engineer in Paris, and then went to work under Louis Pasteur, who was studying diseases in silkworms. This inspired Chardonnet to seek an artificial replacement for silk. He opened a factory in Besançon 1889 and another in Hungary 1904. Chardonnet's starting point was mulberry leaves, the food of silkworms; he turned them into a cellulose pulp with nitric and sulphuric acids and stretched it into fibres. The original fibre was highly flammable, but by 1889 he had eliminated this and developed rayon.