Nylon is a new conquest in the manufacture of fabrics. The threads this industry requires are either, like the threads of artificial silk, cotton, and linen, of vegetable origin, or, like the threads of wool and silk, of animal origin.
Nylon, however, is a purely synthetic substance, made from chemical compounds extracted by the distillation of coal by special processes. Neither plant nor animal, then, has any part in its composition — unless we carry our minds back tens of millions of years, when the earth was clothed in dense forests which the belly of the earth later swallowed up through earthquakes, and these trees, after long ages, under the effect of tremendous pressure and high heat, turned into coal and petroleum...
In this article I shall try to explain briefly what this nylon is, whose name is now on every lip and tongue, and which has been able to rival silk in many of its uses.
The raw materials for making nylon
Nylon was born — if it is right to call it an industrial newborn — on the twenty-eighth of February, 1935, the day the American chemist Carothers succeeded in obtaining the new substance after long experiments and researches. He was thereby the first to invent a purely synthetic material fit for use in the manufacture of fabrics.
This chemist obtained nylon
as the result of a reaction between two organic compounds (Composés Organiques), one containing the elements carbon and oxygen, the other the elements carbon and nitrogen.
These two substances are made from phenic or carbolic acid (Acide phénique ou Acide carbolique), a compound much used in the manufacture of dyes and colors; it is also an antiseptic substance much used in dentistry and in certain kinds of soap, such as the Lifebuoy soap well known in Beirut.
This carbolic acid is extracted by the distillation of coal by special processes; it is then taken and subjected to several chemical reactions by which it is turned into a compound called adipic acid (Acide adipique), which is the compound containing the element oxygen. The second compound is made from this same adipic acid, by making the acid react with ammonia and hydrogen gas; from this results a substance called hexamethylene-diamine, which is the compound containing the element nitrogen.
How nylon is made
Suitable quantities of these two
compounds are taken and dissolved in an organic liquid somewhat resembling benzine, and the whole is placed in a polished steel boiler. The reason for dissolving the two compounds is that dissolving increases