Nylon Trivia
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48 free Nylon trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This nylon trivia quiz covers the first commercially successful synthetic thermoplastic and the strange, sad story of the man who made it. It starts in DuPont's Experimental Station: Wallace Carothers hired away from Harvard in 1927, the neoprene detour, the cold-drawing trick, the first strand of nylon 66 pulled on February 28, 1935, and the suicide sixteen months before the world heard the word 'nylon'. It covers where that word came from (and where it did not), the toothbrush that used it first, the 4,000 pairs of stockings that sold in three hours in Wilmington, and the 64 million pairs sold in the first year. The second half moves through the wartime parachutes and black-market stockings, the 40,000 women who queued in Pittsburgh during the nylon riots, the cadaverine rumour, the blends that fixed nylon's itchy, static-charged flaws, Chanel and Dior showing DuPont fabrics, the nylon flag planted on the Moon, and the chemistry: what the numbers in nylon 6 and 66 mean, why nylon salt is made, and how the melting points differ. It finishes with tyres, Glock frames, oven bags, 3D-printer filament and carpets. Questions range from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on nylon, Wallace Carothers and the nylon riots.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01DuPont made 'nylon' a household word, yet deliberately never did what with the name?
Registered it as a trademark
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.
Q 02Which earlier cellulose-based DuPont fibre was an important precursor to nylon?
Rayon
DuPont's experience with rayon fed directly into how it developed and marketed nylon over an eleven-year programme from 1927 to 1938.
Q 03Why did DuPont, America's only nylon maker, begin licensing rivals in 1951?
To head off an antitrust suit
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.
Q 04Nylon is famous for stockings, but in which humbler product did it debut in 1938?
Toothbrush bristles
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.
Q 05Nylon stockings first went on sale in a single city in October 1939, where shoppers had to show what?
Proof they lived locally
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.
Q 06In October 1939 nylon stockings first went on public sale in just one city, DuPont's home town of where?
Wilmington
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.
Q 07By DuPont's own later account, the name 'nylon' began life as which rejected name for the product?
No-Run
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.
Q 08A persistent but false legend says the name 'nylon' joins the names of which two cities?
New York and London
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.
Q 09From what three raw materials did DuPont's marketing say nylon was made?
Coal, air and water
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.
Q 10A damaging news story suggested nylon might be made from which chemical extracted from corpses?
Cadaverine
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.
Q 11Who made up most of the audience when DuPont first announced nylon in October 1938?
Middle-class women
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.
Q 12At a wartime bond rally, a pair of nylons belonging to which Hollywood pin-up was auctioned for $40,000?
Betty Grable
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.
Q 13Which political argument helped win wary Americans over to nylon stockings around 1940?
Q 21Which synthetic rubber did Carothers' team discover in spring 1930, before nylon?
Neoprene
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.
Q 22In 1930 Julian Hill found that stretching a polymer fibre made it far stronger, a technique known as what?
Cold drawing
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.
Q 23In 1938 chemists in which country made their own nylon, Perlon, from a chemical DuPont's team had written off?
Germany
It reduced silk imports from Japan
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.
Q 14During the Second World War, most nylon production went to the military for what?
Parachutes and tents
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.
Q 15In June 1946 some 40,000 people queued for 13,000 pairs of nylons in which Pennsylvania city?
Pittsburgh
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.
Q 16What did women do with surplus military nylon after the war?
Cut it up for blouses and wedding dresses
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.
Q 17How did women fake stockings during the wartime shortage?
By painting seam lines down their legs
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.
Q 18At DuPont's 1939 World's Fair pavilion, which promoted a whole science, what was the nylon-stockinged model called?
Miss Chemistry
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.
Q 19How did nylon's inventor die in April 1937?
Suicide by cyanide
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.
Q 20In 1936, a year before his death, Carothers became the first industrial organic chemist elected to which body?
The National Academy of Sciences
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.
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.
Q 24Which university did DuPont lure Carothers away from in 1928?
Harvard
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.
Q 25In 1931, during Prohibition, Carothers and three fellow DuPont scientists shared a house known by what nickname?
Whiskey Acres
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.
Q 26Which chemical linkage, the backbone of proteins too, defines the nylons?
Amide linkages
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.
Q 27In the name nylon 6,6, what does each 6 count?
Carbon atoms
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.
Q 28In the classroom 'nylon rope trick', a continuous nylon thread is pulled from where?
The boundary between two liquids
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.
Q 29Carothers' team drew its first strong synthetic fibre from a polyester in 1930; why was it shelved?
It melted in hot water
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.
Q 30Econyl, a recycled nylon used by swimwear and fashion labels, gives a second life to which ocean waste?
Discarded fishing nets
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.