Brandenberger stopped coating fabric and made a film itself

One night in 1900 a Swiss chemist, Jacques Brandenberger, was dining in a Paris restaurant when a patron spilled a glass of wine and the waiters had to strip and replace the whole tablecloth. He thought how inefficient that was, and began thinking about a research problem he was already working on: the organic polymer cellulose. He wondered whether he could spray liquid viscose, a solution of regenerated cellulose, onto fabric to make a waterproof coating for tablecloths.

The experiments had promise but ultimately disappointed. The fabric coatings were indeed waterproof, but they proved far too stiff to keep the fabric pliable. As he worked, however, he noticed something far more interesting: the coating could be peeled away from the fabric without any difficulty, yielding a thin, diaphanous film. The value might not be in the waterproofed cloth at all, but in the film itself.

He changed course. Instead of coating fabric he set out to make the film on its own, as a continuous sheet of regenerated cellulose. The process, refined by 1912 with the addition of glycerin to soften it, extruded viscose through a narrow slit into an acid bath that re-converted the viscose and regenerated the cellulose as a solid film. He patented the product and a manufacturing process and sold the commercial rights to the firm Comptoir des Textiles Artificiels. He named the film cellophane, a portmanteau of cellulose and the French diaphane, meaning transparent.

The film's first big adopters were food makers like America's Whitman's candy, which saw that it could let a customer see the product inside the package. In 1923 DuPont bought the exclusive U.S. rights and a year later reformulated the film to be moisture-proof, and by 1938 cellophane accounted for 10% of DuPont's sales and 25% of its profits.