Death, Sex, and Nylon

The invention of plastic plummeted us into a collective dream, an occult heritage we thought dead, now coming to life in perplexed new forms. We projected ourselves into plastic's material will to change. Yet plastic is, Roland Barthes notes, "the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic. […] for the first time, artifice aims at something common."

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Twenty days after Wallace Hume Carothers applied for the "fiber 6-6" (nylon polymer) patent in April 1937, he checked himself into a Philadelphia hotel room and drank a cyanide cocktail. He had been wearing a capsule of potassium cyanide on his watch chain during the synthetic fiber's development, and as a chemist, he knew dissolving cyanide in a citric solution would quicken the poison's effect. His suicide took place at the crossroads of the biological: two days after his forty-first birthday, in the first trimester of his wife's pregnancy, less than a year into mourning his beloved sister's sudden death, and several years before the word 'nylon' burst into being. These elements bonded to form a chain of reactions, an exchange of properties. Carothers was prone to wandering off, sometimes for weeks at a time. In those blank moments of his biography, we see him at a distance, walking away, barely visible, on the other side of the river, or tracks, or highway. We know a few things: he didn't want children. He felt bereft in the wake of his sister's fatal car accident. With the Depression cutting into DuPont's budget, the company officially modified its expectations for Carothers, demanding he work toward commercial goals. And the more DuPont pressured him to produce commercial applications of his ideas, to shift from pure to practical research, the harder he failed to find meaning or inspiration in his work. This era also marks DuPont's move away from its original market in manufacturing explosives in an attempt to rid itself of the 'merchant of death' image and to avoid antitrust concerns over its stronghold on the defense industry. In doing so, the company transformed the old science of war explosives into the mythical modernity of polymer chemistry. When we say 'chemistry,' we mean the effort to turn creativity into money, waste into worth, and sex and death into a consumer good.

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Carothers's patent's approval—his fiftieth for DuPont—came posthumously. Immediately newspapers reported that "one of the ways to prepare the new synthetic silk fiber might be to make it out of human corpses" by using cadaverine, a reeking chemical excreted from decaying flesh. Gunpowder and dynamite residue, the traces of wartime death and suicide, it turns out, is hard to shake off. Just like DNA, nylon is a polymer, but instead of cracking the code of life, it impersonates life. At the 1939 World's Fair, "Princess Plastic," modeling nylons, emerged from a giant test tube, as DuPont's press release sought a rebirth of nylon's image: "wholly fabricated from coal, water, and air" yet "fashioned into filaments as strong as steel, as fine as the spider's web." Using organic metaphors to outdo nature, DuPont heralded the nylon stocking industry and the Age of the Leg. With it came a chemical industry revelation, proof that polymers uniquely could be predicted and engineered, which sparked a vision of a world to come. On May 15, 1940, officially known as Nylon Day (N-Day), five million pairs of brown nylons landed in department stores. They sold out in two days.

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Nylons emblemized a technologically rich tomorrow, in step with the dream of air conditioning and television. They evoked the electrified utopian dreams of American empire extended into the natural world, which would be colonized and perfected through science. Our domestication of the atom meant a Faustian manipulation of creation itself. The life cycle of organic materials no longer mattered: death to silk and cotton, long live synthetics! By returning us to nylon's early affiliation with death, a reminder of how much thanatos is wrapped up in eros, nylons carried a mystique of otherworldly enchantment, a...