Ma'am, it's mine! About the nylon riots

In the end, public pressure took its toll: DuPont was forced to license the production of nylon stockings to other companies, the supply rose steadily and the nylon riots subsided.

Depression is a cruel disease. Those who suffer from clinical depression talk about the terrible feeling of emptiness and the inability to enjoy, be happy and maintain a normal life routine. Dr. Wallace Carruthers had reason to be happy in 1937: a few years earlier he had discovered a revolutionary and ground-breaking chemical process that paved the way for the creation of fibers with miraculous properties.

But the terrible depressions from which Dr. Carruthers suffered, since his childhood, prevented him from enjoying this success. He felt that his life was empty of content and aimless. One day in April he locked himself in a hotel room, drank lemon juice and swallowed a cyanide pill. Carruthers was an excellent chemist, until the last moment: he knew that the strong acid in the juice would accelerate the effect of the cyanide on the body. he was right.

The DuPont company was founded in 1802 and grew to become a chemical giant on a global scale. In the early XNUMXs, her public image was at an all-time low due to scandals related to her dealings with the American military. Luckily for her, all that was about to change.

Several years earlier, in 1926, the company initiated the establishment of an innovative research laboratory and recruited Dr. Wallace Carruthers to head it. Carruthers and the lab team began researching a topic that was controversial among chemists at the time: artificial fibers. Many believed that it would be difficult - if not impossible - to create a real substitute for natural fibers like silk. Carruthers and several other chemists sought to disprove this claim by building from scratch an artificial silk-like fiber.

It took four long and difficult years, but in 1930 the breakthrough came. One of Carruthers' assistants inserted a stick into a bucket containing a sticky, liquid paste of a plastic material, which, as mentioned, was extracted from petroleum. When he pulled the stick out, long, thin fibers were pulled from the buckets and quickly hardened. The assistant tried to tear them hard, but the fibers did not give in easily: they resisted the load and almost cut his fingers. It was a first-of-its-kind plastic polymer, a strong and stable yet highly flexible man-made fiber that was internally codenamed 'Fiber 66'.

This discovery was the right fiber, at the right time. Silk comes from the Far East, and the United States received almost all of its silk from Japan. But throughout the 66s, the tensions between these two powers increased and with it the import of silk also decreased. Fiber XNUMX, they knew at Dopo, is the perfect substitute for Japanese silk.

There was one specific product that was made of silk, and which was of great importance to the Americans - or more precisely, to American women: tights. Tights made of silk are delicate, caressing and sculpting.... I mean, that's what they tell me. Not that I really have a clue. It's really impossible to get tights in my size.

If...I was...looking for tights in my size, I mean.

Does not matter. However, real tights were both comfortable and strong, and would develop very few 'trains', those unpleasant scratches on the fabric. Dufo immediately began working on the production of tights from fiber 66 while maintaining complete secrecy. There were those who claimed, in all seriousness, that the work on the tights at DuPont was more secret than the work on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. At the same time, Dufo was looking for a successful commercial name for the new fiber. A special committee was established that came up with no less than four hundred names for the new miracle substance, among them 'Duparo' and 'No Ren' ('Ren', in slang, is a train in pantyhose). The name that caught on, in the end, was 'Nylon'.

Despite the secrecy, rumors began to spread on the American street about a new invention that was going to 'kill silk'. Newspaper articles talked about a fantastic fiber as strong as steel that could be used to make soft tights that would never open trains.
These rumors created a dilemma for Dupuy. On the one hand the over-enthusiastic commentators have given Dupuy wonderful PR and fantastic sales promotion. On the other hand, Dofu also knew that nylon is not really capable of doing all these things. It is indeed strong, but not like steel - and pantyhose made of nylon definitely develop trains after a while. The nylon is not perfect. There were several engineers at Dopo who tried to explain the matter to journalists, but without much success.

The pantyhose hit the stores in 1939, and immediately a massive onslaught on them began. Four million tights were sold in one day! The stunned shopkeepers described the female reaction as 'a flock of chickens running into the coop at feeding time'.

Unfortunately for the women of America, the wonderful nylon was taken from them as suddenly as it was given to them. In 1942, the United States entered World War II and Dufoe, like other large industries, moved to produce exclusively for the military. The nylon that was supposed to be made into caressing pantyhose was now diverted to the production of parachutes for airplanes, vests for soldiers in the East Asian rain forests and similar uses. The women, like the entire American public, enlisted in the war effort. The nylon tights became a kind of symbol of the civil sacrifice for the homeland. The common saying was 'take them down for Uncle Sam'. Countless nylon tights were collected from the closets and shelves, recycled and turned into, among other things, the wheels of bomber planes, which were nicknamed 'flying tights'.

That doesn't mean it was easy for women to forget their pantyhose.
In August 1945, with the end of the fighting, Dufu returned to selling pantyhose to the civilian market. It's hard to describe what happened when the tights returned to the shelves. All the pressure the women experienced during the war, the need to sacrifice for the country, the desire to finally return to a normal life... everything was channeled and drained into desire into one piece of clothing.
In many places in the United States, thousands of women marched on clothing stores. In Pittsburgh, for example, forty thousand women fought over thirteen thousand pairs of pantyhose that were in the store. And by 'fought', I mean 'fought': elbows in the ribs, kicks, shoves, curses, hair pulling. The amused journalists described the nylon riots using the military jargon that was still in their mouths: 'Sale of pantyhose in Chicago! There are no casualties'. A police officer who had to break up a particularly violent riot at the entrance to a clothing store declared to a journalist, 'I hope I never see a woman.'

There were many who accused DuPont of deliberately hoarding the tights and creating an artificial demand. Dupuy refuted these claims and claimed that the company produces thirty million pairs of tights a month: enough tights for everyone. They pointed the finger of blame at women who they claimed hoarded pantyhose unnecessarily, such as one woman who bought thirty-six pairs of pantyhose. In the end, public pressure took its toll: DuPont was forced to grant production licenses for nylon stockings to other companies, the supply steadily increased and the nylon riots subsided.