Hilaire de Chardonnet

{{Short description|French engineer, inventor of artificial silk (1839–1924)}}

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{{Infobox person

|name = Count de Chardonnet

|image = Comte_de_Chardonnay.jpg

|image_size = 250px

|caption = Hilaire de Chardonnet sculpture by his daughter Anne de Chardonnet

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|birth_date = {{Birth date|1839|5|1|df=y}}

|birth_place = Besançon, France

|death_date = {{Death date and age|1924|3|11|1839|5|1|df=y}}

|death_place = Paris, France

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|nationality = French

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Louis-Marie Hilaire Bernigaud de Grange, Count (Comte) de Chardonnet (1 May 1839 – 11 March 1924) was a French engineer and industrialist from Besançon, and inventor of artificial silk.

In the late 1870s, Chardonnet was working with Louis Pasteur on a remedy to the epidemic that was destroying French silkworms. Failure to clean up a spill in the darkroom resulted in Chardonnet's discovery of nitrocellulose as a potential replacement for real silk. Realizing the value of such a discovery, Chardonnet began to develop his new product.{{cite book|last=Garrett|first=Alfred|title=The Flash of Genius|url=https://archive.org/details/flashofgenius00garr|url-access=registration|year=1963|publisher=D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc.|location=Princeton, New Jersey|pages=[https://archive.org/details/flashofgenius00garr/page/48 48]–49}}

He called his new invention "Chardonnet silk" (soie de Chardonnet) and displayed it in the Paris Exhibition of 1889.{{Cite book | last = Editors | first = Time-Life | title = Inventive Genius | publisher = Time-Life Books | location = New York | year = 1991 | isbn = 0-8094-7699-1 | page = [https://archive.org/details/inventivegenius00time/page/52 52] | url-access = registration | url = https://archive.org/details/inventivegenius00time/page/52 }} Unfortunately, Chardonnet's material was extremely flammable, and was subsequently replaced with other, more stable materials.

He was the first to patent artificial silk, although Georges Audemars had invented a variety called rayon in 1855.