Reiwa Chemist Yōko Takatsukasa Reincarnation: Saving Japan with Plastic Material

RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR | A Phoenix Born of a Hawk

2021/9/25: Chapter 1 was completely rewritten to match the revision of Chapter 2.

- Toshitsugu Utei

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1901

A certain noble family's mansion

A young girl was staring at five small bottles on a table. Behind her, the girl's father watched her with eyes filled with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, wondering what on earth she is going to do.

"...Okay. First, dissolve the right amount of caustic soda (NaOH) in distilled water..."

Eventually, the girl decided to open one of the vials and began to stir its contents with a glass rod in a little glass of distilled water.

"Into this aqueous sodium hydroxide solution, I'm going to put hexamethylenediamine... Once this is dissolved, I will dissolve adipoyl chloride in benzine..."

One by one, the girl proceeded with the experiment, speaking aloud to confirm each step of the process.

"...Now pour this benzine gently over the NaOH(aq)..."

The benzene in which "adipoyl chloride" had just been dissolved was poured over the distilled water in which "sodium hydroxide" and "hexamethylenediamine" had been dissolved, and the liquid in the glass was divided into two layers like water and oil.

".........!"

The girl, who recognized some kind of change in the glass, picked up the border between the two layers of liquid with a chopstick and slowly pulled it up. Then, something like a white thread slowly grew out of the cup.

"...It worked, Father...!"

The girl desperately tried to suppress her desire to scream, and with a shiver, she showed the white thread that had grown out of the cup to her father, who was looking on behind her.

"Is that... silk?"

"No, Father, this is called polyamide...! It is completely different from artificial silk (rayon) in its manufacturing process, properties, and chemical structure...!"

What the girl was doing was an experiment in synthesizing polyamide, or nylon, which is a trivial task for the modern era. The monomer adipic acid (in this case, adipoyl chloride, or adipic acid dichloride, was used to enhance reactivity) and hexamethylenediamine were dissolved in two incompatible solvents, and the reaction took place at the interface between the two solutions, resulting in the synthesis of a high-quality plastic under mild conditions.

"I see... but it's still an artificially created yarn, right? This is amazing, Yōko, when our country is still unable to produce artificial silk."

"Not only our country, but no one else in the world should be able to synthesize this substance...! This is a world's first, the first in the world...!"

As the girl—Yōko excitedly answered as she reeled in the nylon, the invention of nylon in history occurred on February 28, 1935, and the interfacial copolymerization method that Yōko used in this experiment was a synthetic method disclosed to the world on July 3, 1958, so the times were clearly not the same.

"The world's first... huh?"

"You still don't get it, do you, Father? This thread will change Japan and the world."

"Hmm, I'm not a chemist, so I can't say anything until you show me exactly how it can be used..."

Yōko's father, Prince Hiromichi Takatsukasa, did not seem to understand what his daughter had done. But with a sigh, he turned to her and said what she expected him to say.