About the Atlas

The project

The Atlas is a reference work with a memory. Each entry opens in a particular year (usually the year the material was first made) and tells that year's history alongside the polymer's own, so the chemistry arrives attached to a place and a moment. What follows is the encyclopedia proper: identity, classification, synthesis, structure, thermal and mechanical properties, processing, applications and environmental fate, every value carrying its source and its status, including the ones nobody has verified yet.

Ninety-six entries span seven eras, and there are three ways through them: a sortable catalogue, a timeline along the era spine, and a constellation chart you can pan across two centuries. Family pages gather a lineage in one place, concept pages carry the equations and person pages the chemists. Three tools (a molecule lookup, a property predictor and a side-by-side comparison) sit deliberately to one side of the encyclopedia. The reading is yours to set: three presentation styles, light or dark, SI or imperial.

How to read an entry

Every property is a value with a history. A small number beside it points into the entry's numbered references, and each value is in one of four states, which the page always shows rather than hides:

1.14 g/cm³^[1]

Read in the cited source.

1.14 g/cm³estimate

Inferred from a family's typical range rather than measured, and marked as such.

not yet available

Nobody has found a sourced value yet. It is a gap, and it says so.

Not applicable

The property does not exist for this material, like a melting point for a thermoset.

Where it comes from

Property values are taken from two reference handbooks, Wypych's Handbook of Polymersand Mark's Polymer Data Handbook, and from the literature and encyclopedias each entry cites. The photographs are historical images from Wikimedia Commons, each credited with its author and licence in the entry's Illustrations list. The chemical structures are drawn for the Atlas in one house style, in two dimensions and in three.

Contact

Corrections, additions and arguments about attribution are all welcome.

Support

Everything here is free to read: no advertising, no accounts, no membership. If the Atlas has been useful, a contribution goes toward the next entries: their sources, their photographs, and the evenings spent checking both.