Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : HISTORY OF NYLON STOCKINGS

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

When Nylons Came to Town

It took about 10 years for DuPont to turn the invention of polyamide into nylon stockings for the consumer market, but boy did it pay off.

When the first nylon stockings, made from a material invented by DuPont, came to the US market in 1940, they were an immediate smash success. As hemlines continued to rise in the 1930s, silk and rayon stockings became a necessity in many women’s wardrobe, but they were expensive and had to be replaced frequently. When department stores stared selling low-cost nylon stockings nationwide on May 15, 1940, most locations were sold out by noon, according to Distillations magazine from the Science History Institute. By the following year, Dupont sold $25 million worth of nylon yarn, and two years later it had captured an astonishing 30% of the full-fashioned hosiery market. In terms of material science, the origin of that material dates back to 1930, when an organic chemist by the name of Wallace H. Carothers joined DuPont, where he focused on polymerization research.

The first nylon:

On May 24, 1934, one of Carothers’ researchers “successfully pulled a fiber of a polymer based on an aminoethylester. His fiber ultimately the first nylon  retained the remarkable elastic properties of polyester [formulated four years earlier by Carothers’ group] but lacked their drawbacks. However, since the intermediate used to form the polymer, aminononanoic ester, was tremendously difficult to produce, Carothers and his associates kept looking,” writes Distillations. Shortly afterwards, they settled on polyamide 5,10 and polyamide 6,6. The rest, as the cliche goes, is history . . . but, in fact, DuPont still had to overcome several obstacles before reaching that commercial milestone.

The company had to perfect melt spinning under high temperatures to form the filaments, design generators to run the windup of the yarn at high speeds with almost no variation, and develop a surface coating that would not gum up the machines. An article on the American Chemical Society website explains this in much greater detail for those who want to take a deeper dive into the genesis of nylon.

When DuPont had just started reaping the commercial rewards of all this R&D work in 1940, it had to shift nearly all of its nylon production to the military in 1941 to support the war effort. The material was used for everything from parachutes to mosquito nets, reports Mental Floss in its abbreviated history of nylon. Nylon stockings, along with chocolate bars and cigarettes, were also among the coveted goodies that GIs distributed to German citizens, rare luxuries in a decimated population that initially feared retribution.

The nylon riots:

Immediately after the war when production resumed to satisfy consumer demand, lines formed outside of department stores that, according to Mental Floss, dwarfed Black Friday queues and sparked what became known as the “nylon riots.” In Pittsburgh, 40,000 people lined up for more than a mile vying for 13,000 pairs of nylons, according to the Smithsonian magazine.

Carothers, sadly, did not live to see the remarkable success of his invention. After battling depression for several years, he committed suicide in 1936.

source: Norbert Sparrow-Plastics Today