Rayon is made from wood or cotton pulp and was first known as artificial silk. Rayon was the first manufactured fiber to be developed. A Swiss Chemist, Georges Audemars invented the first crude artificial silk about 1855. He actually dipped a needle into liquid mulberry bark pulp and gummy rubber to make threads. This of course was slow and inaccurate. Quite a few years later Avtex Inc first commercially produced “artificial silk” or Rayon in 1910 in the US. The term rayon was first used in 1924.