General view of Joseph X. Labovsky seated at a work bench in the "66" laboratory at the DuPont Experimental Station located in Wilmington, Delaware. Labovsky's colleague, Micky McGuire, is visible on the left-hand side of the photograph.

Joseph X. Labovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine on September 10, 1912 and emigrated to the United States in 1923. After graduating from Wilmington High School in 1930, Labovsky joined I.E. Du Pont de Nemours & Company as a laboratory assistant to Wallace Carothers at the Experimental Research Station in Wilmington, Delaware. Labovsky earned his B.S. in Industrial Chemical Engineering from the Pratt Institute in 1934 and continued to work with Carothers’ research group and later at Du Pont’s plants in Seaford, Delaware and Martinsville, Virginia during the early years of Nylon research and production.