A smartphone is not designed to stop a bullet.
And to be fair, a Kevlar vest makes a pretty bad touch screen.
But both rely on the same type of material to do their jobs: liquid crystals.
And these revolutionary materials might never have seen the light of day without their discoverer, Stephanie Kwolek, intervening on their behalf.
Kwolek was a chemist at DuPont Chemical Company, where she was tasked with finding long molecules called polymers that the company could turn into strong, lightweight fibers.
The hope was to find a replacement for the steel wire in car tires, which would save on weight and make the cars more fuel-efficient.
Kwolek's breakthrough came in 1964, when she was working with polymers called aramids.
Most polymer molecules are long chains of repeating units, and are flexible like wet noodles because they can spin and twist around their chemical bonds.
But aramid molecules are super rigid, more like steel-reinforced dry spaghetti.
Flat, hexagonal structures in the molecule called aromatic rings keep individual aramid molecules relatively rigid and make them resistant to heat.
