As a young woman, Ruth Rogan was the first driving safety teacher in Louisiana. She was also the first such teacher in the state to drive into a ditch.
“I didn’t know how to drive,” the research chemist matter-of-factly explained to Lemelson-MIT in 2002, when she was awarded the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her groundbreaking work in textiles that included her team’s discovery of wrinkle-resistant cotton. The process—which helped rejuvenate the cotton industry following the development of synthetic fibers in the late 1930s and 1940s—was part of a teaching and scientific career that spanned seven decades and 55 patents.
Ruth Rogan Benerito was a pioneer in much more than driving safety.
According to The Newcomb Archives, part of Tulane University’s Newcomb College Institute, she enrolled at Newcomb at 15 and graduated with a B.A. in Chemistry in 1935. She earned her Master of Science degree at Tulane University shortly after by taking night classes while teaching full-time.
Benerito and Margaret Strange (Klappard), the latter who became vice president of the University of Alabama Medical School, were the only women allowed to take physical chemistry at Tulane because it was not offered at Newcomb.
“We took it with the engineers. They didn’t like it one bit,” Benerito told the Newcomb Oral History Project in 1986.
She taught college classes during World War II. Two years after receiving her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago (1948), she married Frank Benerito and took a job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Southern Regional Research Laboratories in New Orleans. She spent most of her career there.
During the Korean War in the early 1950s, she developed a way to deliver fat intravenously to patients who were too sick to eat, a process that was used to feed seriously wounded soldiers. But her best-known achievement came later in the decade, when the research team she led discovered how to treat cotton fibers so the chainlike cellulose molecules were chemically joined and fortified.
The new product was one big molecule, featuring a “crosslinking” that made cotton wrinkle resistant. Benerito likened it to a woman getting a permanent wave treatment for her hair.
Once the method was perfected, properties such as stain and flame resistance were added to the fibers.
During her 33-year career as a chemist, she also created an environmentally safe process to pre-treat cotton using radiofrequency cold plasma, rather than the hazardous sodium hydroxide. Her inventions have been applied to the paper and wood industries and used by manufacturers of detergents, chemicals, ceramics, and films.
Benerito retired from the USDA but continued teaching in New Orleans until 1997, when she was 81.
She received the USDA’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award (1970), and was recognized by President Lyndon B. Johnson for her scientific and teaching achievements. She died in October 2013 at the age of 97.
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