From the Normandy landings to women’s lib: iPhone of the 1930s celebrates 80th birthday
LAST week marked the 80th anniversary of one of the most successful product introductions ever. On October 24, 1939, nylon stockings went on sale for the first time.
“Customers were lined three-deep at the counters most of the day,” reported the New York Times, noting that many buyers were men.
The sale was merely a trial: 4,000 unbranded pairs sold by DuPont to demonstrate its new fibre’s real-world wearability.
By 1pm, the six Wilmington, Delaware stores offering them were completely sold out.
When the national rollout took place the following May, about 800,000 pairs sold on the first day.
Nylon’s inventor was an organic chemist named Wallace Carothers, who was hired by DuPont with the promise that he could research whatever he wanted to. He decided to investigate the nature of polymers.
By 1931, his team had synthesised the first polyester and demonstrated that polymers were regular molecules of extraordinary, theoretically unlimited, length.
It was an enormous scientific achievement with no immediate commercial application. Although it easily produced fibres, the new polyester melted at too low a temperature to be practical for textiles.
Nylon came about because DuPont broke its original promise of complete research freedom.
As the Great Depression deepened, the company needed to show a return on its scientific investment. Carothers’s boss told him to figure out how to make a practical polymer fibre. So, beginning in early 1934, Carothers abandoned pure research and set out to make a polyamide that would tolerate hot water and dry cleaning fluid.
After a few months of systematic trials, the lab had its first success: a silk-like filament that stood up to both.
Further experiments found a way to synthesise it using benzene, a plentiful coal derivative, thereby making the new fibre affordable. By the end of 1935, the first nylon yarn was ready for testing.
From the start, DuPont knew that women’s hosiery would be a big market for its new fibre. It touted nylon stockings as a substitute for silk, boasting of the geopolitical implications of slashing Japan’s silk exports. Early sales mostly cut into the market for cheaper rayon and cotton stockings, however.
World War Two temporarily diverted nylon away from consumer products to parachutes, glider tow ropes, mosquito nets and flak jackets.
When Allied paratroopers dropped from the skies to launch the Normandy invasion, they unfurled nylon parachutes. Someone, perhaps an astute DuPont PR man, called the new synthetic the “fibre that won the war”.
DuPont made a deliberate decision not to promote nylon as ‘artificial silk’ but, rather, as an exciting new synthetic made from ‘coal, air and water’.
The clear implication was that nylon was better than old-fashioned silk, and stronger, more elastic, quicker-drying, less likely to spot in the rain, and more durable. Just as the iPhone defined a new device category, leading to competing smartphones, so nylon inspired similar synthetic fibres. After reading Carothers’s results, British chemists Rex Whinfield and James Dickson developed the fibre we know today as polyester.
Synthetic fibres fostered a fundamental shift in fashion expectations that continues to this day.
Comfort and convenience became paramount, and casual styles followed.
Nylons quickly became a synonym for women’s hose, including the pantyhose that supplanted garters and girdles in the era of miniskirts and women’s liberation.
Eventually, nylons also went out of style, supplanted by bare legs or polyester-spandex tights and leggings.
DuPont coined the generic term ‘nylon’ but did not trademark it, reserving proper names for specific uses, such as the Exton toothbrush bristles that were the first nylon on the market.
Those plastic bristles illustrate a technological truth that the iPhone’s makers are facing.
A thrilling new technology is soon completely taken for granted. Incremental improvements continue, but excitement will dim.
When was the last time you appreciated your toothbrush bristles for not absorbing water?