Wallace Carothers: The Tragic Genius Who Invented Nylon and Never Saw It

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Wallace Hume Carothers created the most famous synthetic material of the 20th century and died 16 months before the public heard its name. In 1927 DuPont's Charles Stine lured the young Harvard instructor into a pioneering research group with the promise of pure science. His task was to test Hermann Staudinger's radical idea that materials like rubber and silk were long, unbroken molecular chains. Carothers proved it, and in 1930 his team produced neoprene and a strange elastic paste. Then management demanded a commercial fiber.

This episode follows the five-year grind to Nylon 66, produced on February 28, 1935, and the industrial effort that built a plant in Seaford, Delaware. Carothers, long troubled by depression, died by suicide on April 29, 1937. DuPont carried on without him: the 1939 World's Fair debut, 64 million pairs of stockings sold in a year, the wartime parachutes, the 1946 nylon riots, and the environmental bill that is still coming due.

Julian W. Hill's cold drawing technique pulled tangled polymer chains into parallel alignment, which gave the fiber its strength.
Nylon 66 is named for the six carbon atoms in each of its two ingredients, hexamethylene diamine and adipic acid, heated to 285 degrees Celsius.
A rumor that nylon was made from cadaverine, a chemical tied to decaying corpses, forced DuPont to soften its coal, water, and air marketing.
When stockings returned in 1946, 40,000 people lined up in Pittsburgh for 13,000 pairs.
In smog-heavy cities of the early 1950s, sulfur dioxide formed acid that broke nylon's amide bonds and shredded stockings on the wearer.

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