DuPont Invents Nylon

Date

1935

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

North America (United States)

Era

Modern

Significance

Nylon was the first fully synthetic fiber, a laboratory breakthrough that launched the age of man-made materials and reshaped everyday life.

On 28 February 1935, chemist Gerard Berchet, working under Wallace Carothers at DuPont's Experimental Station near Wilmington, Delaware, produced the polymer polyamide 6-6 by combining hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid. Strong, elastic, and silk-like, "nylon 66" grew out of DuPont's pioneering bet on basic research into long-chain polymers. The company patented the material in 1935 and unveiled it publicly in 1938; nylon stockings reached American stores in 1940 and sold four million pairs in their first days. Beyond fashion, nylon proved a strategic material—used in parachutes, ropes, and tire cords during the Second World War—and established the foundational principles of polymer chemistry that made plastics ubiquitous across the modern world. Carothers, who suffered from depression, did not live to see the triumph; he took his own life in 1937. His invention nonetheless seeded a multi-billion-dollar synthetics industry and changed textiles forever.

Empires active in 1935

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• Empire of Japan
  1868 CE – 1947 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Discovery of nuclear fission
  December 1938 (explained January–February 1939)
• Penicillin and the dawn of the antibiotic era
  1928 (developed for clinical use 1940–1945)
• Formulation of quantum mechanics
  1925–1927
• Haber-Bosch Process Industrialises Synthetic Nitrogen Fertiliser
  September 1913
• The Wright Brothers' Powered Flight
  17 December 1903
• Discovery of X-rays and radioactivity
  1895–1898

Also relevant

• Sulfa Drugs Usher In the Antibiotic Era
  1935

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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