In later years Adams had significant influence on Bolton's ideas about industrial support of chemical research and university students.
In 1913 Bolton won the Sheldon Fellowship, which he used to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute outside of Berlin, Germany, for two years with Professor Richard Willstätter.
Willstätter, apparently impressed by Bolton's ability but frustrated by his tendency to make arithmetic mistakes, commented "You must have been a bank teller."
[1] The disruption of this trade by the war presented an industrial problem at first but simultaneously offered an opportunity for American chemical companies to meet a wartime need and to become better established in this field.
[1] When Bolton returned from Germany in 1915 he discovered American organic chemists struggling to develop methods for manufacturing these compounds.
Dye manufacture requires the synthesis of a large number of intermediate compounds, and Bolton realized these could be used in many activities outside the Dyestuffs Department.
In November 1922 England enacted the Stevenson Act that was intended to protect rubber producers by restricting production and keeping prices from being ruinously low.
But this caused a great deal of concern in the United States because an expanding supply of rubber was needed to support the growing number of automobiles in use.
However, this research did not begin in earnest until 1925, when the high price of rubber was attracting considerable attention and other scientists such as Thomas Edison were also taking an interest in the problem.
[1] Bolton's group's work on synthetic rubber began with the polymerization of butadiene obtained from the hydrogenation of diacetylene, and at first not much progress was made.
At the end of 1925 Bolton met chemist Julius Arthur Nieuwland from the University of Notre Dame who had discovered a way to polymerize acetylene using a cuprous oxide catalyst.
Unfortunately the resulting polymer would explode when struck, but Bolton believed the process could be modified to produce a stable compound that would replace butadiene in the reaction.
Stine persuaded the company to take on a fundamental research project for synthetic rubber and received $250,000 in funding for this purpose.
Bolton operated within this group and by 1929 had discovered that his polymer could be readily converted into 2-chlorobutadiene (chloroprene) with a copper catalyzed addition of hydrogen chloride.
[1] Today, applications of neoprene include: the Rigid-hulled inflatable boat; diving suits, and diveskins; gloves, balaclavas, sleepsacks, Knee high boots, wetsocks and other protective clothing; radar absorbent material; plumbing fixtures; gaskets, hoses, seals and belts; foam (mousepad, wetsuit); orthopedic braces; and solid fuel rocket propellant (see AGM-114 Hellfire).
The first break was finding that bifunctional esterification could produce long molecule chains which today are known as aliphatic polyesters, but at that time were called superpolymers.
On October 27, 1938 DuPont announced it would build a plant at Seaford, Delaware to make nylon, the world's first fully synthetic fiber.