Yay Dupont!

In less than two years Du Pont captured more than 30 percent of the full-fashioned hosiery market. Then the United States' entry into World War II led to the diversion of all nylon into military uses. During the war Du Pont increased its nylon production threefold, to more than twenty-five million pounds a year; the biggest uses were for parachutes, airplane tire cords, and glider tow ropes. When the war ended and women began to demand nylons again, their demand greatly exceeded supply for two years. The shotage led to several riots by impatient women who had stood in line for hours for stockings. Newspapers ran stories with headlines such as "Women Risk Life and Limb in Bitter Battle over Nylons."

Nylon became far and away the biggest money-maker in the history of the Du Pont company, and its success proved so powerful that it soon led the company's executives to derive a new formula for growth. By putting more money into fundamental research, Du Pont would discover and develop "new nylons," that is, new proprietary products sold to industrial customers and having the growth potential of nylon. This faith seemed to be borne out in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the development of Orlon and Dacron and the continued spectacular growth of nylon. Du Pont had effected a revolution in textile fibers, and the revolution propeled earnings skyward.

In fact, Du Pont, which for its first hundred years had been an explosives manufacturer and had in this century become a diversified chemical company, was by the 1950s, in many respects, a fibers company that had some other businesses on the side.




Hundreds of women wait in line on a cold December morning in 1945 to buy hosiery at a New York City shoe store.