THE FATHER OF VINYL, DEAD AT 100

Guess who died? The guy who invented vinyl. His name was Waldo Semon and he was 100.

Semon was a chemist who came up with a particularly useful formulation of vinyl in 1928, while working for B.F. Goodrich, the rubber company. He had been playing around with polymers that other people thought were useless, when he finally concocted a new plastic that could be molded and stretched, and was waterproof and non-conductive. The Wall Street crash of 1929 kept people from wanting to jump into marketing the stuff, but in the '30s Semon got a patent for it and Goodrich began manufacturing it. Soon, vinyl goods like shower curtains and raincoats started appearing in stores.

Semon was thus chief progenitor of the Golden Age of Vinyl, which dawned in the '60s and would eventually encompass blobby Naugahyde sofas, kitchen floor tiles in avocado Congoleum, shoulder bags by Lark, Camaros with pebbly-textured tops, and, most importantly, classic James Brown LPs.

Thanks, Waldo. Way to invent.