Word: nylon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cautious housewife locked all three doors to her house, kept the key on a chain around her neck. The town had been terrified by the brutal drowning of blond Andrew Ashley, 3, who was found floating in the nearby Delaware Park lake, hands and feet tied with nylon stockings. Recalling two similar but nonfatal kidnapings of North Buffalo children during the past two months, a local psychiatrist concluded. "This is the reaction of a person who has become extremely jealous, perhaps as a result of the loss of her own child." But when police finally picked up a likely suspect...
...fight was started by the rayon manufacturers in dismay over nylon's inroads into a market that rayon had dominated since it knocked out cotton tire cord after World War II. Developing a new, high-strength rayon called Tyrex, the rayon companies formed an association to promote it, even sent teams to high schools to lecture teenagers on the superiority of Tyrex over nylon. Nylon makers, led by Chemstrand Corp.. fought back not only with advertising but with price cuts. Before long, tire-cord prices dropped so sharply that the rayon makers, working on tighter profit margins, found...
...advertising does not neglect the motorist, its prime targets are Detroit's automakers and their dealers. Playing on the auto-men's conviction that nothing is so important in selling a car as a smooth ride, Tyrex made much of the fact that when a car with nylon tires is parked overnight, its tires tend to develop a flat spot at the point of contact with the road and will go back to a perfect circle only after several miles of driving. Christening this condition "nylon thump," the rayon makers hammered away at it so successfully that Detroit...
...rebuttal, nylon makers emphasize the tensile strength that gives nylon greater resistance than rayon to severe impacts -especially at the high temperatures generated by turnpike driving. And though independent research seems to suggest that Tyrex is strong enough to withstand any normal driving hazard, the nylon message has reached the motorist's ear. In the first quarter of this year, nylon won more than half (51.9%) of the replacement tire market, though it made only the slightest of inroads (from 1.3% to 1.6%) in the new-car business...
Dark Horses. Tire manufacturers have an unstated leaning toward nylon, partly because the public is willing to pay up to 10% more for nylon tires. They would also like to see an end to the fight so that they will no longer have to stock duplicate sets of tires. Seiberling Rubber Co. has tried to compromise with a combined nylon-rayon tire that, the company insists, has the advantages of both cords and the disadvantages of neither. Ironically, both nylon and rayon may lose out in the end. Experiments by tire-company researchers suggest that Dacron, Fiberglas or steel...