<v Speaker 1>A police officer takes four rounds to the chest at

<v Speaker 1>point blank range and walks out of the hospital. A

<v Speaker 1>week later, a soldier absorbs a blast of shrapnel that

<v Speaker 1>should have ended him. A firefighter steps into a wall

<v Speaker 1>of falling debris and comes home to dinner that night.

<v Speaker 1>And the reason all three of them are alive traces

<v Speaker 1>back to a single afternoon in a laboratory in Delaware

<v Speaker 1>into a chemist who found something so strange, so bizarre looking,

<v Speaker 1>that the rule book said pour it down the drain.

<v Speaker 1>And because she didn't, the twentieth century got the strongest

<v Speaker 1>fiber it had ever seen, stronger than steel and yet

<v Speaker 1>light enough to wear all because Stephanie Quollick was too

<v Speaker 1>curious to give up from Hey Dad Productions, This is

<v Speaker 1>anonymous America. Stephanie was born in nineteen twenty three in

<v Speaker 1>New Kensington, Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of a foundry

<v Speaker 1>worker who died when she was only ten years old.

<v Speaker 1>He had passed something along to Stephanie before he died

<v Speaker 1>a love of the natural world. As a girl, she

<v Speaker 1>pressed leaves and flowers into notebooks, and she studied the

<v Speaker 1>small machinery of living things. She thought she might become

<v Speaker 1>a doctor. She earned a chemistry degree in nineteen forty

<v Speaker 1>six from what is now Carnegie Mellon, and she took

<v Speaker 1>a job at the DuPont Company, not as a career,

<v Speaker 1>but as a way to save money for medical school.

<v Speaker 1>It was after the war and many of the men

<v Speaker 1>were still returning from service, and the door was briefly

<v Speaker 1>open to a woman with a mind for science, and

<v Speaker 1>she walked through it. And then something unexpected happened. Stephanie

<v Speaker 1>fell in love with the work the medical school planned well,

<v Speaker 1>that just quietly went out the window, and she would

<v Speaker 1>spend her entire career at DuPont, most of it as

<v Speaker 1>the only woman in the room. By the mid sixties,

<v Speaker 1>Stephanie's lab was chasing a very practical problem. A fuel

<v Speaker 1>crunch was coming, and DuPont wanted to build a fiber

<v Speaker 1>that was strong enough and light enough to replace the

<v Speaker 1>steel belts inside automobile tires, something that could make cars

<v Speaker 1>lighter and threefier with gasoline. So her days were spent

<v Speaker 1>dissolving long chains of molecules into liquids and running those

<v Speaker 1>liquids through a machine that would spin them into thread.

<v Speaker 1>Then one day in nineteen sixty five, she prepared a

<v Speaker 1>batch and it came out all wrong. The solution she

<v Speaker 1>expected should have been clear and thick, kind of like honey.

<v Speaker 1>Well she got instead was thin and cloudy, almost as

<v Speaker 1>watery as skim milk, and hazy like it were full

<v Speaker 1>of tiny particles. And by everything Stephanie had ever been

<v Speaker 1>taught that haze meant contamination. It meant the batch it failed,

<v Speaker 1>It meant the ordinary sensible professional thing to do was

<v Speaker 1>throw it away and start over from scratch. But she

<v Speaker 1>looked at it again and that of discarding it, she

<v Speaker 1>carried it down to the technician who operated the spinning

<v Speaker 1>machine and asked him to run it through. He politely refused.

<v Speaker 1>He told her it would clog his equipment, that a

<v Speaker 1>solution that cloudy surely had solid bits in it, and

<v Speaker 1>that was going to ruin the spinneret. But she kept asking,

<v Speaker 1>and she finally talked him into it. Stephanie was nothing

<v Speaker 1>if not persistent. Well, the fiber that came out was

<v Speaker 1>unlike anything either of them had ever seen. When they

<v Speaker 1>tested it, the numbers came back so high the lab

<v Speaker 1>assumed a mistake had been made, and they ran it

<v Speaker 1>all over again, but there was no mistake. The new

<v Speaker 1>fiber was five times stronger than steel by weight, and

<v Speaker 1>it wouldn't melt. Years later, Stephanie described that moment with

<v Speaker 1>characteristic understatement. She said, we knew we made a discovery,

<v Speaker 1>but we didn't jump around the room and shout about it.

<v Speaker 1>We just went back to work trying to figure out

<v Speaker 1>what to do with it. Well, that cloudy batch of

<v Speaker 1>messed up experiment would become kevlar, and it was released

<v Speaker 1>to the world nineteen seventy one. It went into tires

<v Speaker 1>as intended, but it went so much further than that,

<v Speaker 1>into brake pads and boat hulls, fiber optic cables and spacesuits,

<v Speaker 1>work gloves and combat helmets, and most famously, into the

<v Speaker 1>bulletproof vest. There's a police lieutenant in Dover, Delaware, who

<v Speaker 1>took four rounds from a drug suspect back in two

<v Speaker 1>thousand and one. One bullet was turned aside by his badge,

<v Speaker 1>another struck his name tag and bent into the shape

<v Speaker 1>of a horseshoe. The other two were caught by the vest.

<v Speaker 1>He lived, and later he picked up a telephone to

<v Speaker 1>call and thank the woman whose curiosity had stopped those bullets,

<v Speaker 1>and by then thousands of officers and soldiers and firemen

<v Speaker 1>were walking around because of Stephanie. But here's the part

<v Speaker 1>that gets left out of Stephanie's story. As a company chemist,

<v Speaker 1>she had signed her rights to the discovery over to

<v Speaker 1>the company. That was just how employment would DuPont worked.

<v Speaker 1>So she never earned a persontional fortune for the most

<v Speaker 1>life saving fiber of her century. And when people raised

<v Speaker 1>that with her, she just waved it off. She said,

<v Speaker 1>you know, the lives that had been and would be

<v Speaker 1>saved because of kevlar was payment enough. Stephanie was inducted

<v Speaker 1>into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in nineteen ninety five.

<v Speaker 1>She retired without fanfare and died in twenty fourteen at

<v Speaker 1>the age of ninety. Every rule of the laboratory told

<v Speaker 1>Stephanie that that cloudy batch was a total failure. The training,

<v Speaker 1>the procedure, and her fellow researchers all pointed to the drain,

<v Speaker 1>but she kept it because she was curious enough to

<v Speaker 1>look at a mistake more than once. The strongest thing

<v Speaker 1>she ever made wasn't the fiber. It was the decision

<v Speaker 1>not to throw it away. That's Stephanie Quillock, and that's

<v Speaker 1>anonymous America