Word: fibers
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Thirty years have passed since chemists at E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. revolutionized the textile industry by introducing a man-made fiber named nylon. Since then, Du Pont has continued to mount an impressive list of synthetic firsts in textile fibers, including Orlon, Dacron and Teflon. Last week at a press preview in Manhattan's First National City Bank Building, the chemical Goliath unveiled its latest unnatural discovery: Qiana. (Pronounced...
...took 20 years and $75 million to develop (compared with $27 million for nylon). Thus it was no wonder that the security at Du Font's Chattanooga, Tenn., pilot plant took on Pentagon proportions. To the trade, it was known simply as "Fiber Y." Even at the press preview, Du Pont took no chances of leaking the process before it hits the market at year's end. Six models wearing Qiana garments were escorted by armed guards to prevent any overanxious competitor from the common practice of snipping a sample swatch...
...Angeles' Ron Davis maintains that his 4-in.-thick slabs of tutti-frutti-colored fiber glass, cast in glossy, translucent and sometimes opalescent layers, are meant to be "about" nothing but "what colors are and where you put them." If a visitor suggests that Davis' flat shapes seem to hang away from the wall and look very much like twelve-sided swimming pools, Davis will protest that all he meant to depict was "the illusion of a dodecahedron." What makes the dodecahedron distinctively different is that it is shown as though seen from far, far above. The effect...
...economic upheavals and two world wars, had to diversify to stay afloat. Over the years, Margarete Steiffs family (she died in 1909) gradually expanded its facilities to manufacture other toys, including kites, wagons, wooden scooters and construction games. It also went into production of valves for pneumatic tires and fiber glass. Today the various family-owned enterprises are small but unmistakably healthy, with sales totaling some $14 million a year...
...ready for production. One particularly nagging problem was the difficulty of transmitting the image from one stage to the next without excessive distortion or loss of light. Army researchers, under Electrical Engineer Robert S. Wiseman, known as "Mr. Night Vision" to his colleagues, overcame that hurdle by using fiber optics. These unusual lenses are made up of bundles of extremely thin glass fibers, each of which transmits light by bouncing it from wall to wall down the length of the fiber. With their glass-fiber lenses, the Fort Belvoir team not only kept the light in a straight line...