nylon history

In 1940, John W. Eckelberry of DuPont stated that the letters "nyl" were arbitrary and the "on" was copied from the suffixes of other fibers such as cotton and rayon. A later publication by DuPont explained that the name was originally intended to be "No-Run" ("run" meaning "unravel"), but was modified to avoid making such an unjustified claim and to make the word sound better.
An apocryphal tale is that Nylon is a conflation of "New York" and "London". Equally spurious is the backronym for "Now You've Lost, Old Nippon" referring to the supposed loss of demand for Japanese silk.