Nylon, the first true synthetic fiber, is patented
On this day · 16 February 1937
DuPont's patent crowned years of polymer chemistry, giving the world a fiber spun entirely in the lab rather than off a plant or an animal.
On February 16, 1937, the U.S. Patent Office granted E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. patent No. 2,071,250, covering the synthetic polymer the company would market as nylon. The inventor was Wallace Carothers, an organic chemist DuPont had lured from Harvard in 1928 to pursue pure research into long-chain polymers.
Nylon mattered because it was the first commercially viable fiber made wholly in a laboratory — not harvested from cotton, silk, or wool. Carothers’ team had synthesized the workhorse version, nylon 6,6, in 1935, and the patent locked in the breakthrough.
Carothers never saw the payoff: he died in 1937, the year his fiber was patented.
Nylon reached shoppers first as toothbrush bristles, then famously as women’s stockings, which went on sale in 1940 and sold out instantly. During World War II it was rerouted to parachutes, tents, and rope — proof that a lab curiosity had become a strategic material.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
