Nylon

Nylon emerged from a corporate experiment in pure science and claimed its inventor before he could witness its triumph. In 1926, DuPont's Charles Stine convinced the executive committee to fund fundamental research with no obvious practical applications—a radical departure for an industrial company. The following year, Stine recruited Wallace Carothers from Harvard, nearly doubling his salary to $6,000 per year and promising complete freedom to choose his research subject.

Carothers chose polymers because Hermann Staudinger had recently proven that small molecules could bond in long chains—macromolecules that most chemists still refused to believe existed. His goal was to create "superpolymers" with molecular weights above 4,000, proving the macromolecular hypothesis through deliberate synthesis. By the early 1930s, his team had produced a superpolyester that could be pulled into fiber strings when melted—the first synthetic silk. But these early fibers melted at low temperatures and dissolved in dry-cleaning solvents.

In early 1934, Carothers pivoted from polyesters to polyamides, synthetic proteins more stable than the fat-like polyesters. On February 28, 1935, Gerard Berchet synthesized half an ounce of polymer from hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid—each with six carbon atoms, hence "66." The fiber was strong, elastic, unaffected by water or most solvents, and had a high melting point. DuPont selected it for full-scale production.

Carothers never saw the result. He had suffered depression since youth and had warned DuPont during his interview about "a recurring neurotic impairment of my productivity." Years before his death, he showed a colleague a capsule of potassium cyanide carried on his watch chain. In April 1937, sixteen months before DuPont's public announcement, Carothers dissolved the cyanide in lemon juice at a Philadelphia hotel and died. His daughter was born seven months later.

On May 15, 1940—Nylon Day—DuPont released 4 million pairs of stockings nationwide. They sold out in four days. In New York, 72,000 pairs vanished on the first morning. Japanese silk producers who had been earning $70 million annually from American women suddenly faced obsolescence. Within two years, nylon captured 30% of the hosiery market. Then Pearl Harbor redirected the entire output to parachutes, ropes, and flak jackets—production exploding from 1.3 million pounds in 1940 to 85 million in 1945. The scientist who proved that molecules could be deliberately engineered into entirely new materials died believing he had run out of ideas.