Portrait of DuPont chemist Joseph X. Labovsky (1912-2013), taken at the DuPont pilot plant in Seaford, Delaware during the early stages of nylon production and research.

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. Labovsky retired from Du Pont in 1975 and devoted much of his time to lecturing on Wallace Carothers and the history of Nylon. Joseph Labovsky died on March 24, 2013 in Wilmington, Delaware.