nylon stockings(1939)

摘要

It is customary,in this magazine,to refer to polymers by their generic names.But as nobody in the history of the world has ever used the sentence"I’m going to pop on a lovely pair of polyamides"before now,we’re going to refer to Nylon in this instance."Nylon"and"stockings"quickly became synonymous.Nylon was not just the brand name of the chemical,"Nylons"became the generic name for"stockings".After toothbrush fibres,stockings were the first consumer application for the controversial new material.Developed by DuPont in 1935,Nylon had a problematic birth.In 1936,its inventor,Wallace Hume Carothers,took his own life,convinced that his product was a failure.And there was a small amount of public hysteria about the polymer’s composition: a Washington News article led many to believe that Nylon was made using Cadaverine,a chemical produced from rotting corpses(technically a feasible precursor for a bio-polyamide,but a pretty hard sell for any marketing department).