Nylon Definition : Definitions for the Clothing & fabric Industry

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Nylon is a synthetic polymer, a plastic, invented on February 28, 1935 by Wallace Carothers at the E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company of Wilmington, Delaware, USA. The material was announced in 1938 and the first nylon products; a nylon bristle toothbrush made with nylon yarn (went on sale on February 24, 1938) and more famously, women's stockings (went on sale on May 15, 1940). Nylon fibers are now used to make many synthetic fabrics, and solid nylon is used as an engineering material.

Chemically, nylon is a condensation polymer made of repeating units with amide linkages between them: hence it is frequently referred to as a polyamide. It was the first synthetic fiber to be made entirely from inorganic ingredients: coal, water and air. These are formed into two intermediate chemicals, most commonly hexamethylene diamine and adipic acid (a dicarboxylic acid), which are then mixed to polymerise. The most common variant is nylon 6,6, also called nylon 66, which refers to the fact that both the diamine and the diacid have 6 carbon backbones. The diacid and diamine units alternate in the polymer chain. Therefore, unlike natural polyamides like proteins, the direction of the amide bond reverses at each bond.

There is no evidence for the popular belief that "nylon" is a contraction of "NY" (for "New York") and "Lon" for "London", the two cities where the material was first manufactured. In 1940 John W. Eckelberry of Du Pont stated that the letters "nyl" were arbitrary and the "on" was copied from the names of other fibers such as cotton and rayon. A later publication by Du Pont (Context, vol. 7, no. 2, 1978) explained that the name was originally intended to be "No-Run" ("run" in this context meaning "unravel"), but was then modified to avoid making such an unjustified claim and to make it sound better. The story goes that Carothers changed one letter at a time until Du Pont's management were satisfied.

Another popular belief is that nylon stands for "now you, lazy old nippon," as nylon was developed in the 1930s. In this sentence nippon stands for Japan, as in the 1930s, the decade in which nylon was developed, a chemical "war" was taking place between the US and Japan.

Even though the word nylon was coined, it was never trademarked.