Du Pont

E.I. du Pont was younger son of watchmaker from Paris. At age 14, he wrote a paper on the manufacture of gunpowder and gained a position at France’s central powder agency.There he had worked on advanced explosives production techniques with the famous chemist Antoine Lavoisier.He learned the superior skills of black powder manufacture (the combination of sulfur, potassium nitrate and charcoal) at the French government’s gunpowder agency.

After the onset of the French Revolution, he gave up powder-making to assist in his father’s small printing and publishing business.In 1797 a mob ransacked their printing shop due to moderate political views of his father and they were imprisoned. In late 1799 they fled to America.They brought much more than powder-making expertise and capital raised from French investors.He broke ground for his first powder mills on the Brandywine River on July 19, 1802.He established his powder mills upstream from Wilmington, intending to harness the Brandywine River’s power and to use the city’s port for shipping. E.I. was certain that he could produce black powder superior to the best available American product at that time. DuPont’s Brandywine powder mills did indeed manufacture the highest quality black powder. By the beginning of the War of 1812, DuPont had become the leading black powder supplier to the U.S. government.

Alfred Victor du Pont (1798-1856) was the last of E.I. du Pont’s children born in France and the first to head the powder company.Alfred began his career with DuPont by rebuilding the mills. After E.I. died in 1834, Alfred’s succession was delayed for three years while his father’s former assistant, James Antoine Bidermann, reorganized the partnership. After he took over in 1837, Alfred compounded E.I.’s investment in pension plans for disabled workers and the widows and orphans of those killed at the mills.Alfred’s chief interest, however, was technology.Alfred passed his own enthusiasm on to his son Lammot.

In 1857 Lammot du Pont developed a new method of black powder manufacture which substituted South American sodium nitrate for the more expensive, British-controlled potassium nitrate. This change not only freed American powder from dependence on Great Britain but also resulted in a more powerful blast than existing black powder. Lammot’s "B" blasting powder was the first notable change in black powder composition in more than 600 years.Two years later, DuPont purchased the Wapwallopen powder factory outside Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to manufacture this blasting powder for industrial uses. During the Civil War, DuPont supplied almost 40 percent of all powder used by the Union army and navy.Lammot du Pont established the Repauno Chemical Company in 1880 after failing to convince his uncle, Henry du Pont, to enter the dynamite business.

Valuable acids were escaping from Repauno's nitroglycerin plant and killing fish in the Delaware River. In March 1884 Lammot du Pont was seeking a better way to recover them at the Repauno plant, when the acids overheated and exploded, killing Lammot and four others.This effort at applied research took a terrible toll, but Lammot, a University of Pennsylvania-trained chemist, believed that the company's survival depended on research.

Between 1802 and 1880, black powder was the sole product manufactured at DuPont.DuPont took over controlling interest in Repauno after Lammot’s death, and stayed at the forefront of the chemical industry due in part to efforts carried out there. Chemists working at Repauno’s Eastern Laboratory, established in 1902, developed new processes for manufacturing trinitrotoluene (TNT) and other explosives. By the 1920s, Repauno had become the world’s largest producer of dynamite.With expanded chemical facilities, Repauno began to produce dimethyl terephthalate (DMT), a chemical intermediate used in manufacture of Dacron and DuPont products. 

The black powder market eroded further with the development of smokeless powder in the 1890s. Derived from guncotton, smokeless powder burned more cleanly than black powder and provided greater explosive force. The two world wars accelerated research and development of new explosives like TNT and blasting gelatins. Following World War II, black powder production declined rapidly until all commercial manufacture was discontinued in the mid-1970s.

When the du Pont cousins bought the company in 1902, they sought new uses for the raw materials of explosives, particularly in the production of lacquers, paints and coated textiles. This move toward diversification was furthered by a 1912 antitrust decision, which deemed DuPont a gunpowder monopoly and ordered the company to divest itself of a substantial portion of its explosives business.Since the early 1900s, DuPont's labs have conducted two types of research. "Applied research" focuses on developing new products or finding new uses for existing ones. "Basic research" pursues scientific questions not necessarily connected to any specific product or market, but on the faith that science will eventually open up new possibilities.

DuPont, a major producer of nitrocellulose for explosives manufacture, entered plastics production as a logical step toward diversification. In 1915 DuPont purchased the Arlington Company, a manufacturer of Pyralin®, a nitrocellulose pyroxylin plastic used in combs, collars, cuffs and automobile side curtains.During the 1930s, chemical researchers at DuPont improved existing plastics and invented new ones. In 1931, while investigating alternative uses for its high-pressure technology, chemists in the Ammonia Department discovered the methanol-based methyl methacrylate. Trademarked Lucite, this tough, clear polymer was among the first plastics derived from petroleum, not nitrocellulose. At about the same time, agreements with Union Carbide and the Shawinigan Corporation brought DuPont into production of Butacite®, a polyvinyl butyral plastic. Butacite would find a major market as an interlayer for automotive safety glass. By World War II, these petroleum-based products had replaced nitrocellulose in DuPont’s plastics industry.

Effort to apply scientific research directly to the development of specific products and production methods proved successful, yet the company continued to maintain its centralized basic research efforts in the Chemical Department.Faith in basic research was validated when, in 1930, the Chemical Department's Wallace Hume Carothers discovered not only neoprene synthetic rubber but also nylon, the first true synthetic fiber. Nylon's phenomenal success in both consumer and military markets helped to cement DuPont's post-World War II commitment to high-stakes, open-ended, basic research.In the years after World War II, DuPont, led by former chemical engineer Crawford Greenewalt, redoubled its efforts to plumb the field of organic chemistry for the next new nylon. When World War II brought an urgent need for new products, DuPont plastics proved up to the task. Lucite found extensive use as a glazing in bombers and fighter planes. DuPont’s Teflon® polytetrafluoroethylene, first discovered in 1938, was used in nose cones on artillery shell proximity fuses and also played a role in the Manhattan Project atomic tests due to its ability to withstand extremely corrosive environments. Wartime contracts assured DuPont and other plastics manufacturers of steady markets and fostered the rapid development of new plastics technology.

In 1946 DuPont authorized the expenditure of $50 million for construction of new labs. The research arms of the separate product departments were beefed up to carry out basic, as well as applied, research. This move represented a compromise between Stine's belief in basic research and Bolton's more cost-conscious approach.

In 1867 Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel successfully stabilized nitroglycerin to create dynamite, a high explosive providing three times the power of black powder. Unable to convince company president Henry du Pont to begin dynamite operations, Lammot entered the business independently when he organized the Repauno Chemical Company in 1880. Repauno was later fully incorporated into DuPont and became the world’s largest producer of dynamite by the 1920s.

Kinston, N.C., is the site of the world’s first plant devoted to the commercial production of polyester fiber. DuPont invested $3 million in a laboratory and $40 million in production facilities on the 10-acre site, and began the manufacture of Dacron in 1953.In the early 1950s, ICI opened a U.S. dye facility. In response, DuPont’s Organic Chemical Department laid plans to enter the British rubber market by building a neoprene plant. In 1957, DuPont UK Ltd. announced plans to build that plant on a former naval airfield at Maydown, seven miles from Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Construction started that year. Since it began operations, Maydown also has manufactured Orlon, (from 1968) Lycra (from 1969) and Hypalon. These products have subsequently ceased production or, in the case of Lycra, transferred ownership.

Focus was shifted to peacetime products like textiles and industrial chemicals resulted in a dramatic reduction in new explosives production through the 1950s and 1960s.During the 1960s, the Experimental Station's Chemical Department, recently renamed the Central Research Department, mounted an open-ended effort to produce dramatic breakthroughs in building materials and electronics, as well as more traditional products. Few of these "New Ventures" paid off, however, due to escalating research costs, increased foreign competition, and a shift away from synthetics in clothing fashions. The economic downturn of the 1970s forced DuPont to retrench.The company began to rely more heavily on acquisition than research to augment and diversify its product bases, culminating in the purchase of Conoco Oil in 1981.

In 1949 DuPont president Crawford Greenewalt looked to speed plastics development by combining the Ammonia Department’s research expertise with the marketing skill of the Plastics Department to form the new Polychemicals Department. This proved an unqualified success as the department’s sales and earnings tripled in the 1950s due to the introduction of tougher, more versatile plastics like Delrin® acetyl resin, Elvax vinyl resin and Zytel® polyamide resin. Between the 1970s and 1990s, DuPont moved aggressively into new plastics markets. Today, DuPont plastics are being used in a wide array of applications including piping, beverage containers, countertops, automobile bumper systems, semiconductor processing and electrical insulation.

DuPont discontinued all manufacture of TNT in the early 1970s and dynamite was eclipsed by the company’s new line of water gel explosives that provided greater safety and reliability. By the early 1990s, DuPont ceased all explosives production and sold Remington Arms, ending nearly 200 years of a continuous product line.

The 1991 formation of the DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Company, a joint venture with prescription drug giant Merck and Company, made DuPont a competitive force in the field of life sciences.DuPont Dow Elastomers opened for business in 1996 as a joint venture between DuPont and The Dow Chemical Company, combining the global market position of DuPont with new technology from Dow. DuPont Dow Elastomers offered a wide variety of products ranging from thermoset rubber polymers used by the general rubber industry to high-performance fluoroelastomers used by the chemical processing and automotive industries. Former DuPont products offered by the joint venture included neoprene, Hypalon®, Kalrez®, Nordel® and Viton®.

DuPont UNIAX – new to the company in 2000 – is a leader in electroluminescent polymers, a display technology that offers the prospect of a flexible, very thin display made entirely of plastic material. In June 2001 DuPont Displays formed Three-D OLED LLC, a joint venture to design, assemble and market Organic Light Emitting Diode displays modules.

On July 1, 2015, DuPont completed the separation of its Performance Chemicals segment through the spin-off of The Chemours Company (Chemours).

Chemours began to operate as an independent, publicly traded company with world-leading businesses in Titanium Technologies and Chemicals & Fluoroproducts and well-established positions in attractive global markets. The spin-off advanced DuPont’s transformation to a higher growth, higher value, global science and innovation company fully focused on markets where its science provided a distinct competitive advantage and enabled the company’s drive for higher, more stable growth.