Fibers before chemistry
For thousands of years, cloth came from plants and animals: cotton, linen, wool and silk. The machines of the Industrial Revolution made these fibers cheaper to spin and weave, but they did not change what the fibers were. Supply still depended on harvests, flocks and, for silk, the labor of raising silkworms.
The first step away from that came in the late 1800s with artificial silk, later called rayon. Rayon is made by dissolving cellulose, usually from wood pulp, and forcing it through tiny holes to form filaments. It is often described as “semi-synthetic” because it starts from a natural material. Fully synthetic fibers came later, when chemists learned to build long-chain molecules from small chemical building blocks.
Carothers and the invention of nylon
The best-known early breakthrough came from DuPont in the United States. A research group led by chemist Wallace Carothers had been studying polymers, very large molecules made of repeating units. Their work in the early 1930s led to polyamides, and in 1935 the team produced the polymer later known as nylon 6,6, formed from two chemicals, adipic acid and hexamethylenediamine. The result could be melted and drawn into strong, smooth filaments.
DuPont announced nylon publicly in 1938. Its first commercial uses included toothbrush bristles, and women’s stockings followed. Stockings went on sale in limited areas in 1939, and sales broadened in 1940. Carothers died in 1937 and did not see the product’s success.
During World War II, nylon was redirected to military uses such as parachutes and rope, so civilian stockings became scarce. After the war, nylon returned to shops and expanded into carpets, ropes, tire cord and molded plastic parts. In Germany, around the same time, researchers at IG Farben developed a related fiber, nylon 6, which followed a different chemical route.
Polyester
Polyester followed a few years later. In England, chemists John Rex Whinfield and James Tennant Dickson, working for the Calico Printers Association, patented a polyester fiber in 1941. It was based on polyethylene terephthalate, now known by the abbreviation PET. Rights were licensed internationally, and the fiber was marketed in Britain as Terylene and in the United States as Dacron.
Polyester resisted wrinkles, dried quickly and held its shape. In the 1950s and 1960s it spread into shirts, suits and household fabrics, often blended with cotton or wool. Other synthetic families also appeared, including acrylics, sometimes used as a wool substitute, and spandex, an elastic fiber introduced by DuPont in 1958 and sold under the name Lycra.
Why synthetics spread
Several reasons combined, and their relative weight varies by fiber and place.
- Raw materials. Early nylon chemicals came from coal-based sources, and later production relied heavily on oil and natural gas. The growth of petroleum refining and industrial chemistry supplied large volumes of cheap starting material.
- Consistency. A fiber made in a factory can be made uniformly strong and fine, and can be adjusted in thickness, shine and stretch.
- Easy care. Synthetic fabrics dried quickly and needed less ironing, which suited the rise of home washing machines and a shift in laundry work.
- Price and scale. Once plants were built, output was not limited by weather or animal herds. That made it possible to price fabrics low.
- Performance. Nylon’s strength and elasticity made it useful for hosiery, ropes and parachutes in ways that natural fibers matched less well.
Chemically, these fibers belong to the same broad family as bakelite plastic: materials built from long polymer chains, tailored by chemists rather than gathered from nature.
Mixed results
Synthetic fibers also have drawbacks. Many do not breathe as well as cotton, can hold odors, and can melt rather than char when exposed to high heat. Because they are made from fossil-fuel-based chemicals and do not readily break down, there is ongoing concern about the environmental effects of making them and of tiny fibers shed during washing. Researchers are still measuring these effects, and recycling and bio-based alternatives are under active development.
The changes for the textile industry were also large. Spinning a synthetic fiber is a chemical manufacturing process, and the filaments are extruded by machines rather than twisted from fluffy staple. The older machinery still processed many synthetic fibers cut into short lengths, but the fiber itself came from the chemical plant. That marked a real shift: the core of fiber production moved from field and flock to laboratory and refinery.
Today synthetic fibers account for a large share of the world’s fiber production, with polyester among the most widely produced. Natural fibers remain important, and many garments combine both, drawing on the strengths of each.