Time March 16–23, 20201960s1966
Stephanie Kwolek
Inventor of resilience
Twice in chemist Stephanie Kwolek’s
life, she refused to take no for an an-
swer, and both times it paid off. The first
was in 1946 when, just out of Carnegie
Mellon University, she applied for a job
at DuPont and was told that it’d take two
weeks for an answer. That timing was a
problem, she told her interviewer, since
she had another offer to consider. So on
the spot, she was offered the job.
The second occurred in 1964.
Kwolek, still at DuPont, had been as-
signed to develop long-chain polymers
that could be manufactured at tem-
peratures below 200°C (392°F); lower-
temperature polymers meant stronger
polymers. Kwolek came up with a thick,
cloudy fluid with the opalescence of
spoiled meat. She took it to the lab to
be spun down into whatever fibers it
might produce, and the operator of the
device refused, worrying that the stuff
would clog the equipment. She insisted.
The result: Kevlar, which she patented
in 1966. Today, Kevlar is used in more
than 200 products including spacecraft,
cell phones and, of course, bulletproof
vests that have saved the lives of count-
less police officers and soldiers around
the world. ÑJeffrey Kluger
1967
Zenzile Miriam Makeba
Sound of South Africa
The 1967 global hit “Pata Pata,” sung by Johannesburg-
born Zenzile Miriam Makeba, wasn’t South Africa’s
freedom anthem—apartheid wouldn’t end for another
27 years—but it provided the opening riff for a revolution.
A musician forced into exile in the U.S. in 1960 by a
regime weary of her vocal opposition, Makeba, known by
then as Mama Africa, salted her international concerts
with harrowing accounts of growing up black under white-
minority rule. Wherever she toured, condemnation of her
government followed. “People think I consciously decided
to tell the world what was happening in South Africa,”
she once told an interviewer. “No! I was singing about my
life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was
happening to us—especially the things that hurt us.” The
opening chords of “Pata Pata” were an irresistible ear-
worm; by the time Makeba hit the refrain, audiences were
already moving, both with the music and against the apart-
heid regime. Makeba returned to South Africa once apart-
heid began to crumble in 1990, picking up almost exactly
where she had left off 31 years prior: using her music as a
balm for her country’s wounded soul. ÑAryn Baker64 KWOLEK: HAGLEY ARCHIVE/SCIENCE SOURCE; MAKEBA: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES