From a black powder company to a chemical conglomerate, the corporation has weathered generations of change.

When French immigrant Eleuthère Irénée du Pont founded E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. in 1802, few would have guessed he was laying the groundwork for a company with 85,000 employees in 70 countries more than two centuries later. Today, his original gunpowder plant on the banks of Delaware’s Brandywine River has evolved into a $25 billion company that produces chemical products used in coatings, apparel, electronics, health care, nutrition, and food.

The story of DuPont, the corporation, begins with the great chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his appointment as head of France’s Gunpowder Commission. In 1787, the first year of the French Revolution, he began supervising a young apprentice, E. I. du Pont (1771–1834). In 1791, du Pont left powdermaking to work in his father’s small printing and publishing business. Lavoisier had moderate political views—a liability in revolutionary France. In 1794, he was guillotined on trumped-up charges. Two years later, a mob pillaged the du Ponts’ printing shop and they were imprisoned. Soon after, the du Pont family fled to the United States.

Building on Black Powder
Arriving in the United States in January 1800, E. I. du Pont was well prepared to start his own company. Armed with the knowledge of advanced gunpowder (then known as black powder) techniques from Lavoisier and capital from French investors, he returned briefly to France in 1801 to purchase powder-making equipment and raise additional capital. Construction of his first gunpowder mill near Wilmington, DE, began on July 19, 1802. Waterpower from the Brandywine drove the mill’s machinery (see drawing), and willow trees growing nearby supplied charcoal, a key ingredient of gunpowder.

Gunpowder was used more often in blasting operations to build roads, railroads, bridges, canals, and mines than in military operations. For most of its first century, DuPont carried on the tradition of its founder, remaining an explosives company run by members of the family. du Pont’s grandson Lammot, born in 1831, earned a chemistry degree from the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1840s and worked his way up through the family business. He developed a new method of black powder manufacture using sodium nitrate instead of potassium nitrate, which was more expensive. The more powerful explosive that resulted was the first significant change in black powder composition in more than 600 years. These improved gunpowder products were used by the Union Army in the Civil War.

Death and Diversity
In the late 19th century, Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite (a nitroglycerin-based explosive) resulted in an explosive three times more powerful than black powder. In 1880, Lammot left DuPont to start the Repauno Chemical Co. to produce dynamite. Lammot and several workers died in a Repauno plant explosion in 1884. The DuPont Co. purchased the plant after Lammot’s death.

When no senior DuPont partner was willing to assume the presidency of the company in 1902, it was sold to a younger generation of the family: T. Coleman, Pierre S., and Alfred I. du Pont. This marked the transition of DuPont into a research-based chemical company. Under their leadership, the company built research labs and developed new products, including paints, plastics, and dyes based on raw materials and byproducts of the explosives business. The Eastern Laboratory was established in 1902. Chemists working there developed new processes for manufacturing trinitrotoluene (TNT) and other explosives.

The DuPont Experimental Station was founded in 1903 under the directorship of chemist Francis I. du Pont. This station was a separate facility and organizational unit. Scientists at this facility conducted research into nitrocellulose chemistry, particularly in the fields of glycerin synthesis and atmospheric nitrogen recovery. For many years, DuPont chemists explored nitrocellulose chemistry to find profitable outlets for its surplus production capacity.

The 1912 settlement of a U.S. government antitrust lawsuit against DuPont for restraint of trade in the explosives industry forced the firm to divest assets to create two new powder companies, Hercules and Atlas, each with the capacity to produce 50% of the country’s black powder and 42% of its dynamite. (Both firms evolved into strong, independent chemical companies.) The court decision was a clear signal to DuPont that the explosives business could no longer be its major growth vehicle. Thus, government trustbusters played a major role in DuPont’s evolution away from explosives and into broad-based chemical products.

Fabrikoid, a fabric coated with nitrocellulose, was one of DuPont’s first nonexplosives products. Introduced in 1908, it was marketed as artificial leather and widely used in the early 20th century for upholstery, luggage, and bookbinding. The coating process was actually developed by the Fabrikoid Co. of Newburgh, NY. In 1910, DuPont purchased the firm for $1.2 million. In the 1920s, Fabrikoid was widely used for automobile seat covers and convertible tops. Fabrikoid’s nitrocellulose coating was called pyroxylin. It was strong and flexible and colored with pigments suspended in castor oil. When the British World War I blockade of Germany blocked import of German dyes into the United States, DuPont soon needed dyes to produce products like Fabrikoid. It built its Jackson Laboratory at Deepwater, NJ, to conduct dye research. The research advanced the firm’s organic chemistry capabilities and helped build the foundation for its discoveries and product development in the 1930s.

During World War I, DuPont temporarily expanded explosives production. By 1917, DuPont expanded its Carney’s Point plant in Deepwater to nearly 70 times its prewar capacity and increased employment to 25,000 people. But following World War I, DuPont scaled back its munitions business and expanded production of dyes, films, and other chemicals.

Filming the Future
DuPont began working with films and photographic products in the 1910s as part of its effort to find profitable uses for surplus nitrocellulose. In 1924, Pathé Film Manufacturing Corp. (Parlin, NJ), a DuPont joint venture, started making black-and-white 35-mm movie film. By 1927, it was producing color film.

DuPont began producing cellophane in 1924 after acquiring U.S. patent rights to the invention from a Swiss firm. DuPont scientist William Hale Church solved the problem of making the cellophane impermeable to water, which enabled its widespread use in food packaging. By 1938, cellophane accounted for 25% of DuPont’s annual profits. It remained highly profitable until the 1960s, when improved packaging polymers gradually replaced cellophane. DuPont discontinued cellophane production in 1986.

Pretty in Polymers
During the 1920s, DuPont built additional labs and extended its businesses into products for the expanding automobile industry, including Duco quick-drying auto paints. DuPont soon developed strong corporate ties to General Motors (GM). Facing bankruptcy in 1920, GM brought in Pierre S. du Pont, an 1890 Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemistry graduate, to institute the decentralized management that today remains the basis of GM’s corporate structure.

By the 1920s, the automobile industry needed coatings that would dry faster than the two weeks required by conventional paints. Chemists at DuPont’s Redpath Laboratory in Parlin, NJ, developed a thick nitrocellulose pyroxylin lacquer that was quick-drying, durable, and could be colored. Duco reduced automobile finishing time from two weeks to two days and greatly reduced reject rates. Duco was also used on hardware, household appliances, and toys. Later in the decade, DuPont developed an alkyd finish that replaced Duco in many markets.

The stage was set for DuPont to become the major force in synthetic fibers in 1927 when Charles M. A. Stine, the director of its chemical department, persuaded the executive committee to fund a basic research program at the Experimental Station. In the 1930s, under the direction of Wallace H. Carothers, DuPont developed neoprene and nylon as well as the cold-drawn fiber production technique that was used to produce many other synthetic fibers. These discoveries shaped the DuPont of the 1950s and beyond. After World War II, a $30 million building program at the Experimental Station united several geographically dispersed laboratories into a centralized R&D facility.

In the 1950s and 1960s, DuPont made more strides in developing fibers, including Lycra spandex, Kevlar for bulletproof vests and construction, fire-resistant Nomex, and Tyvek nonwoven fabric. The 1970s and 1980s saw DuPont venture into pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, electronics, and, with its purchase of Conoco, petroleum. In the 1990s, DuPont’s scientific base extended into biology with the purchase of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, the world’s largest seed company. The company also developed new refrigerants and propellants to replace ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons.

The Once and Future Company
Just as DuPont’s 1902 centennial saw the company moving in dramatic new directions, the same seems to be occurring in its bicentennial. DuPont divested its petroleum company, Conoco, Inc., in 1999 and sold its pharmaceutical business in 2001. This year, it restructured into six separate, specialized businesses: electronic and communications technologies, performance materials, coatings and color technologies, agriculture and nutrition, safety and protection, and textiles and interiors. The new textiles and interiors unit includes all nylon and polyester fibers. This relatively low-growth $6.5 billion business will be sold or spun off as an independent business by the end of 2003. Thus, the calculated risk-taking of DuPont’s centennial year lives on during its bicentennial.

John K. Borchardt is a research chemist who has published more than 100 technical papers and has been awarded 30 U.S. patents. Send your comments or questions regarding this article to tcaw@acs.org or the Editorial Office, 1155 16th St N.W., Washington, DC 20036.