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The invention of plastic plummeted us into a collective dream, an occult heritage we thought dead, now coming to life in perplexed new forms. We projected ourselves into plastic's material will to change. Yet plastic is, Roland Barthes notes, "the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic. [. . .] for the first time, artifice aims at something common."
Twenty days after Wallace Hume Carothers applied for the "fiber 6-6" (nylon polymer) patent in April 1937, he checked himself into a Philadelphia hotel room and drank a cyanide cocktail. He had been wearing a capsule of potassium cyanide on his watch chain during the synthetic fiber's development, and as a chemist, he knew dissolving cyanide in a citric solution would quicken the poison's effect. His suicide took place at the crossroads of the biological: two days after his forty-first birthday, in the first trimester of his wife's pregnancy, less than a year into mourning his beloved sister's sudden death, and several years before the word 'nylon' burst into being. These elements bonded to form a chain of reactions, an exchange of properties. Carothers was prone to wandering off, sometimes for weeks at a time. In those blank moments of his biography, we see him at a distance, walking away, barely visible, on the other side of the river, or tracks, or highway. We know a few things: he didn't want children. He felt bereft in the wake of his sister's fatal car accident. With the Depression cutting into DuPont's budget, the company officially modified its expecta- tions for Carothers, demanding he work toward commercial goals. And the more DuPont pressured him to produce commercial applications of his ideas, to shift from pure to practical research, the harder he failed to find meaning or inspiration in his work. This era also marks DuPont's move away from its original market in manufacturing explosives in an attempt to rid itself of the 'merchant of death' image and to avoid antitrust concerns over its stronghold on the defense industry. In doing so, the company transformed the old science of war explosives into the mythical modernity of polymer chemistry. When we say 'chemistry,' we mean the effort to turn creativity into money, waste into worth, and sex and death...