Chapter 15
When the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. (aka DuPont) exhibited at the National Sportsmen’s Exposition in New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1895, it was probably the first national trade show for the Wilmington, Delaware–based chemical manufacturer.
Now famed for inventing Freon, Teflon, and Kevlar, DuPont specialized in just one particular product from its founding in 1802 to 1880: gunpowder. By the time of the War of 1812, the company was the largest gunpowder supplier to the U.S. government, later providing as much as half of the gunpowder used by the North in the Civil War. By the dawning of the twentieth century, DuPont had torn off a lion’s share of the explosives market, acquiring more than 100 competitors and holding sway over nearly two-thirds of the industry. It was utterly dominant in the domestic realms of mining and quarrying, construction, and agriculture—to the point of publishing a brochure, “Farmers Handbook of Explosives.” The guide took pains to point out that while the hoi polloi may associate dynamite with “bomb throwing by anarchists, safe cracking ‘jobs’ by burglars,” those instances actually employed the declassé nitroglycerin, and not dynamite, which could safely be used as an agricultural best practice.
At one point early in the century, the federal government decided DuPont threatened a free and open market the way Kirstie Alley threatens an all-you-can-eat buffet. It initiated antitrust proceedings against the company. Five years of litigating later, in 1912, DuPont and its Gunpowder Trade Association were judged an illegal gunpowder monopoly, forcing the firm to divest some of its holdings, which were subsequently turned into two new enterprises: Hercules Powder Co. and Atlas Powder.
Even with those spinoffs, DuPont was still so commanding that it produced nearly 40 percent of all explosives shot from Allied cannons during World War I. Flush with profit from the carnage—the company was spoken of in the same breath as Krupp, and was slapped with the nickname “Merchant of Death”—DuPont bought major stakes in Remington Arms, U.S. Steel, United States Rubber, and other companies.
DuPont had begun years before in the 1920s to cultivate a less bloody and more benevolent image by promoting, over the decades, its other inventions that became staples of modern life, such as Lucite, Freon, Teflon, and Lycra. To accomplish that end, it began educating the public via trade and world’s fairs, like the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936, that frequently inefficient, and sometimes inept, nature was being routinely “improved upon” by DuPont scientists.
In 1935, DuPont began the journey from supplying arms to covering legs, with the invention of nylon, the world’s first synthetic fiber. According to company lore, the material was originally named “Nuron” which backwards spelled “no run.” Perhaps apocryphal, perhaps the truth and nothing but, the story nonetheless suggests the company had an inkling early on that the wonder material could be used as a substitute for silk stockings.
When the company formally announced nylon, it wasn’t at a scientific convention, but at the New York Herald Tribune’s Eighth Annual Forum on Current Problems to an audience of 3,000 attending women’s club members, who met at the site of the upcoming 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair. Once the fair commenced, nylons held center stage at DuPont’s $900,000 pavilion, where live models showed them off to 10 million visitors.
Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library
Bragging that its new fiber was “as strong as steel, as fine as a spider’s web,” the company chose not to register nylon as a trademark. Thus, Americans and the media quickly adapted the word as a generic synonym for any silk-like hosiery.
DuPont built its first full-scale nylon plant in Seaford, Delaware, and began commercial production in late 1939. The next year nylon stockings went on sale for the first time at Gimbels department store in New York. In their first year on the market, nylon stockings sold 64 million pairs and grabbed more than 30 percent of the hosiery market. When shortages of Big Science’s latest miracle fabric resulted from its popularity, “Nylon Riots” followed. In Pittsburgh in 1945, 40,000 people lined up for a rainstorm-soaked mile for the hosiery, while the next year in San Francisco, 10,000 shoppers flooded Market Street after a store had promoted a sale of nylons. After one of its display windows was pushed in by the crush of thousands of shoppers and several women collapsed, the store halted the sale.
DuPont continued to use fairs and exhibitions to promote its chemical wonders. At the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair, it hired Michael Brown, Broadway composer, lyricist, and writer known best for “Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?,” the song “Lizzie Borden,” and his Christmas book series, “Santa Mouse,” to create an industrial musical—i.e., a promotional stage production, popular from the 1950s through the 1990s, put on at conventions and exhibitions for companies such as General Electric Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., and General Motors Company LLC.
Brown, who had previously fashioned musicals for Singer Corp. and J.C. Penney Co., among many others, produced “The Wonderful World of Chemistry” for DuPont. It played nearly 40 times per day at the company’s pavilion at the fair, for a total of somewhere around 14,600 to 17,000 times (accounts vary), making it perhaps the most-performed musical ever. Audiences sat in thrall to the crew belting out lyrics like “With Antron and Nylon and Lycra and Orlon and Dacron, the world’s a better place. You know we all have a smile on that started with Nylon and stretches across each happy face.”