Why do we Call it Nylon Anyway?


Originally published March 2, 2016

Did you know that Parmesan cheese is trademarked and refers only to cheese produced in a specific region of Italy? It is illegal in Europe to call cheese produced outside 5 specific Italian provinces Parmesan. There has never been any Kobe beef sold in the United States. Kobe is a Japanese trademark and refers to beef specifically from Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture, even though every restaurant in Las Vegas serves it. How about Balsamic Vinegar? Oh, you get the idea.

We have a bad habit of ignoring these food trademarks in the United States although in recent years, the Champagne trademark seems to be respected a bit with all of the products not from Champagne France being called sparkling wine instead.

How about Nylon? A number of chemical companies all around the world call their product Nylon but what is Nylon? Is it a chemical name? No, the chemical name is polyamide. Why is all polyamide referred to as Nylon? Is this another violation of someone’s valuable trademark?

Actually the term nylon is not trademarked even though DuPont did coin the term. It’s an interesting story.

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Some Observations From The Last 28 Years In The Plastics Industry

Plastics Selector Inside
I spent many hours looking through these books.

As I mentioned in a recent post, after a number of years of searching, I finally found a copy of the Plastics Materials Digest – International Plastics Selector. Before the internet, when I needed to find a material or look up properties, this is how I did it.

The books contain thousands of property data sheets as well an index that allows you to look up materials by trade name and even physical properties.These books were very good. If you needed a polypropylene with tensile strength over 3600 psi, you could find it in the index and then it would refer you to the page where you could find the full data sheet.

The copy that I found happened to be from 1988, the same year that I started in the industry.

I have had a little time to look through the book now and I have a few observations.

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