Eighty-two years ago today, nylons went on sale to the public for the first time.
Inventor DuPont had chosen Braunstein's, a women's fashion store in Wilmington, Delaware, as the test site for sales of its new "miracle yarn."
Four thousand pairs of nylons sold the first hour.
"Women went nuts," storeowner David Braunstein told the local paper.
They climbed over the counters, nearly crushing the clerks, to get their hands on the product, then fled the store with their purchases to try them on.
The curbs were lined all day with frenzied women slipping on their new hosiery.
We scoff at it today, but in 1939 Dupont's Nylon, the first commercially viable artificial fiber, was a "modern wonder" and a breakthrough in textile manufacturing.
The first successful synthetic polymer, it was also a breakthrough in chemical engineering.
Nylon only came about because DuPont's executives a decade earlier had decided to forego profits and, like Bell Telephone, invest in "pure science." (DuPont's previous efforts at "applied" science had produced only Rayon, a cellulose fiber that flopped, because it sagged and crumbled.)
Although disdained by academics, DuPont's executives managed to attract Harvard chemist Wallace Carothers to lead the company's research team.
Within four years, working without constraints, Carothers' researchers synthesized the first polymer by linking short resins into long chains of molecules.
Eight years later, they created a silky "artificial yarn" they derived from coal tar.
DuPont dubbed the creation "Nylon" and produced over two million pounds of the stuff that same year, turning all of it into women's stockings.
The company captured nearly a third of the US hosiery market within 12 months.
NOTE: Learn how Nylon and Braunstein's fought World War II.
