48 Fun Facts About Nylon

DuPont made 'nylon' a household word, yet deliberately never did what with the name?

Registered it as a trademark: DuPont chose to launch 'nylon' as a generic word for the whole family of materials, which is why rival makers could later sell their own versions under the same name.

Which earlier cellulose-based DuPont fibre was an important precursor to nylon?

DuPont's experience with rayon fed directly into how it developed and marketed nylon over an eleven-year programme from 1927 to 1938.

Why did DuPont, America's only nylon maker, begin licensing rivals in 1951?

To head off an antitrust suit, and partly to meet demand it could not satisfy alone, DuPont licensed the Chemstrand Corporation to make nylon, and more producers followed.

Nylon is famous for stockings, but in which humbler product did it debut in 1938?

Toothbrush bristles: Dr. West's Miracle-Tuft brush of 1938 swapped imported hog hair for DuPont's new filament, well before any nylon stockings reached the shops.

Nylon stockings first went on sale in a single city in October 1939, where shoppers had to show what?

Proof they lived locally kept the 4,000 trial pairs in the one city, and the rest of the country had to wait until May 1940.

In October 1939 nylon stockings first went on public sale in just one city, DuPont's home town of where?

Wilmington, Delaware, where DuPont has its headquarters, saw the first limited sale; the stock was gone within three hours and the rest of the country waited until May 1940.

By DuPont's own later account, the name 'nylon' began life as which rejected name for the product?

No-Run had to go because the stockings could still ladder, so by DuPont's account the letters were reshuffled until 'nylon' emerged, although in 1940 the firm had called the syllable arbitrary.

A persistent but false legend says the name 'nylon' joins the names of which two cities?

New York and London supply the letters in the story, but the material was developed in DuPont's Delaware laboratories and no London organisation had any part in it.

From what three raw materials did DuPont's marketing say nylon was made?

Coal, air and water became the publicity department's stock line for years, perhaps to counter a 1938 newspaper scare about a morbid ingredient in the new fibre.

A damaging news story suggested nylon might be made from which chemical extracted from corpses?

Cadaverine, a compound formed in decaying bodies, featured in a September 1938 newspaper story built on DuPont's patent and, perhaps to counter the morbid coverage, DuPont's publicity long stressed nylon's wholesome origins.

Who made up most of the audience when DuPont first announced nylon in October 1938?

Middle-class women filled the New York Herald Tribune forum on the future World's Fair site, a fitting crowd because DuPont had already picked hosiery as the new material's first big market.

At a wartime bond rally, a pair of nylons belonging to which Hollywood pin-up was auctioned for $40,000?

Betty Grable, whose studio reportedly insured her legs for $1 million as a publicity stunt, handed over her own stockings at the rally to be sold for the war effort.

Which political argument helped win wary Americans over to nylon stockings around 1940?

It reduced silk imports from Japan, which supplied the raw silk in American stockings; with Japan at war in China, boycott campaigners were already urging women to give silk up.

During the Second World War, most nylon production went to the military for what?

Parachutes and tents took most of the output, along with tyre cord and rope, so stockings made before the war changed hands on the black market for as much as $20 a pair.

In June 1946 some 40,000 people queued for 13,000 pairs of nylons in which Pennsylvania city?

Pittsburgh drew one of the biggest crowds of the 'nylon riots' of 1945-46, when factories switching back from war work could not meet the pent-up demand for stockings.

What did women do with surplus military nylon after the war?

Cut it up for blouses and wedding dresses: army-surplus nylon sold off from 1945 gave resourceful brides yards of fine cloth while fabric in the shops was still scarce.

How did women fake stockings during the wartime shortage?

By painting seam lines down their legs, often with an eyebrow pencil, women finished the illusion begun with bottled leg make-up, which consumer magazines were testing as 'liquid stockings' by 1943.

At DuPont's 1939 World's Fair pavilion, which promoted a whole science, what was the nylon-stockinged model called?

Miss Chemistry, a long-legged model in the new stockings, stepped out of a giant test tube at DuPont's pavilion, months before the public could buy a pair.

How did nylon's inventor die in April 1937?

Suicide by cyanide ended his life in a Philadelphia hotel room at 41, after years of deepening depression; his daughter Jane was born seven months later.

In 1936, a year before his death, Carothers became the first industrial organic chemist elected to which body?

The National Academy of Sciences elected him in 1936, but he died the next April and never saw nylon announced a year and a half later.

Which synthetic rubber did Carothers' team discover in spring 1930, before nylon?

Neoprene turned up by accident when a liquid set aside for a few days congealed into a solid that bounced, and the rubber is now familiar from wetsuits.

In 1930 Julian Hill found that stretching a polymer fibre made it far stronger, a technique known as what?

Cold drawing pulls the jumbled chain molecules into line along the fibre; Hill's cooled polyester threads stretched to four times their length, and the same step later gave nylon its strength.

In 1938 chemists in which country made their own nylon, Perlon, from a chemical DuPont's team had written off?

Germany: IG Farben's Paul Schlack spun a fibre from caprolactam in January 1938, a route Carothers had said would not work, and it reached the market as Perlon.

Which university did DuPont lure Carothers away from in 1928?

Harvard lost him only at the second attempt, since he first refused DuPont, warning of his 'neurotic spells of diminished capacity', until an executive came in person and the pay was nearly doubled.

In 1931, during Prohibition, Carothers and three fellow DuPont scientists shared a house known by what nickname?

Whiskey Acres: one evening his three housemates went out in white ties and tall hats while Carothers stayed home alone, as he told a friend in a letter.

Which chemical linkage, the backbone of proteins too, defines the nylons?

Amide linkages join nylon's chains, which is why chemists call nylons polyamides, PA for short; proteins such as silk and wool are nature's own version.

In the name nylon 6,6, what does each 6 count?

Carbon atoms: each ingredient carries six, and though Carothers preferred nylon 5,10, his manager Elmer Bolton pushed 6,6 because its ingredients were easier to make from readily available benzene.

In the classroom 'nylon rope trick', a continuous nylon thread is pulled from where?

The boundary between two liquids that will not mix: nylon forms as a film where they meet, and lifting it out draws a rope that keeps coming as fresh film forms.

Carothers' team drew its first strong synthetic fibre from a polyester in 1930; why was it shelved?

It melted in hot water, so it could never be laundered or ironed; polyester came back a decade later, when British chemists found the tougher version sold as Terylene.

Econyl, a recycled nylon used by swimwear and fashion labels, gives a second life to which ocean waste?

Discarded fishing nets, along with factory scraps, are broken down to their chemical building blocks and rebuilt, so its maker says the yarn matches new nylon and can be recycled again and again.

Ripstop nylon, a favourite of kite makers, resists tearing thanks to what woven into it?

A grid of thicker threads, woven in every few millimetres, stops a small rip from running on across the thin cloth, which is how the fabric got its name.

Which nylon garment, launched by North Carolina's Glen Raven Mills in 1959, boomed once the miniskirt arrived?

Pantyhose, first sold as Panti-Legs, needed nothing to hold them up, so as hemlines rose many women gave up their garter belts for good.

What famous object of the Apollo 11 mission was made of nylon?

The flag planted on the Moon was an ordinary nylon one from a government supply catalogue, hung from a horizontal crossbar so it would seem to fly where there is no air.

Burrs caught in his dog's fur inspired Swiss engineer George de Mestral to invent which nylon fastener?

Velcro copies the burrs' tiny hooks: de Mestral studied them under a microscope after a country walk, then spent years learning to form nylon into hooks tough enough to last.

The frame of which modern pistol is made from a nylon composite?

The Glock, designed for the Austrian army in the early 1980s, has a frame moulded from a tough nylon-based polymer instead of steel; Remington's Nylon 66 rifle had used a DuPont nylon stock decades before.

New York string maker Albert Augustine replaced the gut strings of which instrument with nylon?

The guitar had long been strung with gut, which the war made scarce; Augustine's nylon strings went on sale in 1948 and Andrés Segovia took them up.

By the 1990s nylon was being described as the most popular fibre for which home furnishing?

Residential carpets took to nylon because it outwears other fibres underfoot; a 1998 home-decorating guide called it the most popular carpet fibre in use.

Which struggling DuPont division was rescued by supplying nylon's high-pressure ingredients?

Ammonia: nylon's ingredients called for the department's high-pressure know-how, and making them soon accounted for half its sales.

Nylon stockings are graded in which unit, where a lower number means a sheerer leg?

Denier, named after an old French coin, was the silk trade's measure of fineness long before nylon, so the fibre built to rival silk was sold on silk's own scale.

German chemist Hermann Staudinger was attacked for a 1920s theory that Carothers' DuPont research helped prove right; it said polymers were what?

Single giant molecules, or macromolecules, was Staudinger's answer when most chemists saw only clumps of small ones; Carothers built long chains link by link to settle it, and Staudinger took the 1953 Nobel Prize.

Charles Stine's 1927 DuPont programme, which led to nylon, was set up to pursue what?

Science with no product in mind: research chief Charles Stine persuaded the board to fund pure science for its own sake, and chemists dubbed the new laboratory Purity Hall.

By what name is the Ty-Rap, a nylon fastener Thomas & Betts launched in 1958 for aircraft makers, known today?

The cable tie came to engineer Maurus Logan of Thomas & Betts on a tour of a Boeing plant, where workers were lacing every bundle of wires by hand with knotted waxed cord; he filed his patent in 1958.

Ballistic nylon, the tough weave of modern luggage and watch straps, was first developed in World War II for what?

Flak jackets for airmen followed an Eighth Air Force surgeon's finding that most crew wounds came from slow-moving fragments, which light armour of tough cloth and metal plates could stop.

Hunting for a lighter tyre cord, DuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek invented which chemical cousin of nylon?

Kevlar began as a cloudy liquid that Kwolek refused to throw away; spun into thread it proved far stiffer than nylon, and it went on to line body armour.

Japanese scientists studying ponds beside a nylon factory found bacteria that had evolved to do what?

Digest its waste chemicals: the pond microbes had evolved enzymes, nicknamed nylonase, to break down by-products that did not exist before nylon was invented, a textbook case of evolution caught in the act.

Which Milan fashion house, founded as a leather-goods shop, became a global name with plain black backpacks of industrial nylon?

Prada was an old Milan leather-goods house until Miuccia Prada, the founder's granddaughter, put its little triangle logo on a plain black backpack of industrial nylon, turning a utility cloth into a status symbol.

What happens to nylon fabric when exposed to flame?

It melts rather than burning: held to a flame, nylon shrinks back and fuses into a hard bead, burns only reluctantly and tends to go out, leaving a smell that fabric testers compare to celery.

In the 1940s, physician Charles Bass replaced silk with nylon to remake which everyday item?

Dental floss had been silk thread since the 1800s; Bass, a physician with a passion for clean teeth, found nylon resisted fraying better and could be made in any length or thickness.