Ruth Benerito

Ruth Rogan Benerito was a visionary chemist and inventor who made important contributions in the textile, wood and paper industries. She is most widely recognized for pioneering the development of wrinkle-free cotton.

Benerito was born in New Orleans in 1916. She was encouraged by her mother to pursue higher education at a time when many women did not have access to such opportunities. Having developed a deep interest in science, Benerito earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Sophia Newcomb College, the women’s college of Tulane University, in 1935. Following her undergraduate studies, she first attended Bryn Mawr College as a graduate scholar and then went on to earn her master’s degree in physics from Tulane in 1938 and her doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1948.

Speaking about her experience at the University of Chicago at a time when many faculty members were Nobel laureates, Benerito said, “It was a good education. I was well grounded because I was taught […] by the greatest chemists of the last century. I think that’s what gave me such a good background in chemistry.”

After earning her doctorate, Benerito became an assistant professor of chemistry at Newcomb College. Her teaching and research ranged in subjects from advanced quantitative analysis and physical chemistry to organic chemistry, kinetics and thermodynamics.

In 1953, she began working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Southern Regional Research Center, where she remained for over 30 years. Early in her career with the USDA, Benerito led a project sponsored by the Office of the Surgeon General that led her to develop a fat emulsion that could be used for intravenous feeding, contributing to the care of long-term medical patients. She later moved on to her best-known work, using cellulose chemistry to solve practical problems in the textile, wood and paper industries.

Research conducted by Benerito and her team showed that when mono-basic acid chlorides were bonded to cellulose, the cellulose fibers would not form creases. As the team experimented with treating cotton fibers with mono-basic acid chlorides, they discovered a new method of crosslinking cellulose chains that produced wrinkle-resistant qualities, allowing cotton to compete with nylon and spandex as a “wash and wear” clothing material. Benerito’s further research in this area continued to yield many improvements to her initial discoveries.

While she received many honors throughout her life for her groundbreaking research, Benerito was quick to emphasize the contributions of her team. “I don’t like it to be said that I invented wash wear because there are a number of people who worked on it and the various processes by which you give cotton those properties,” she said. “No one person discovered it or is responsible for it, but I contributed to new processes of doing it.”

In 1959, Benerito became research leader of the Natural Polymers Division, a title she held until retiring in 1986. While in this position, she studied the use of radiofrequency cold plasmas to clean cotton and prepare it for treatment with film or dye. This method has since eliminated a potential environmental hazard by replacing mercerization, or the pretreatment of cotton with sodium hydroxide.

In later years, Benerito returned to teaching, leading chemistry courses at Tulane and at the University of New Orleans. She continued to teach until 1997, when she was 81. “I enjoy teaching; that’s why I kept doing it,” Benerito said. “I think you get a lot of satisfaction seeing your students do well themselves later on in life.”

Over the course of her career, Benerito earned more than 50 patents, many of which have applications beyond the cotton industry. She also received many honors, including the Garvan Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1970 and the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.