DuPont
- (en)
DuPont was founded in 1802 by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, two years after
he and his family left France to escape the French Revolution. The company
began as a manufacturer of gunpowder, as he had noticed that the industry
in North America was lagging behind Europe and saw a market for it. The
company grew quickly, and by the mid nineteenth century had become the
largest supplier of gunpowder to the United States military, supplying as
much as half of the powder used by the Union Army during the American
Civil War.
DuPont continued to expand, moving into the production of dynamite and
smokeless powder. In 1902, DuPont's president, Eugene du Pont, died, and
the surviving partners sold the company to three great-grandsons of the
original founder. The company subsequently purchased several smaller
chemical companies, and in 1912 these actions brought scrutiny on DuPont (under
the Sherman Antitrust Act). The courts declared that the company's
dominance of the explosives business constituted a monopoly and ordered
divestment. The court ruling resulted in the creation of the Hercules
Powder and Atlas Chemical companies.
DuPont also established two of the first industrial laboratories in the
United States, where they began work on cellulose chemistry, lacquers and
other non-explosive products.
In 1914, Pierre S. du Pont, invested in the fledgling automobile industry,
buying stock of General Motors (GM). The following year he was invited to
sit on GM's board of directors and would eventually be appointed the
company's chairman. The DuPont company would assist the struggling
automobile company further with a $25 million purchase of GM stock. In
1920, Pierre S. du Pont was elected president of General Motors. Under du
Pont's guidance, GM became the number one automobile company in the world.
However, in 1957, due to DuPont's influence within GM, further action
under the Clayton Antitrust Act forced the DuPont Company to divest itself
of its shares of General Motors.
In the 1920s DuPont continued its emphasis on materials science, hiring
Wallace Carothers to work on polymers in 1928. Carothers discovered
neoprene, the first synthetic rubber, the first polyester superpolymer,
and, in 1935, nylon. Discovery of Lucite and Teflon followed a few years
later.
Throughout this period, the company continued to be a major producer of
war supplies in both World War I and World War II, and played a major role
in the Manhattan Project in 1943, designing, building and operating the
Hanford plutonium producing plant and the Savannah River Plant in South
Carolina.
After the war, DuPont continued its emphasis on new materials, developing
Mylar, Dacron, Orlon and Lycra in the 1950s, and Tyvek, Nomex, Qiana,
Corfam and Corian in the 1960s. DuPont materials were critical to the
success of the Apollo Space program.
In 1981, DuPont acquired Conoco Inc., a major American oil and gas
producing company that gave it a secure source of petroleum feedstocks
needed for the manufacturing of many of its fiber and plastics processes.
The acquisition, that made DuPont one of the top ten U.S. based petroleum
and natural gas producers and refiners, came about after a bidding war
with the giant distillery, Seagram Company Ltd. who would wind up as
DuPont's largest single shareholder with four seats on the board of
directors. On April 6, 1995, after being approached by Seagram Chief
Executive Officer Edgar Bronfman, Jr., DuPont announced a deal whereby the
company would buy back all the shares held by Seagram.
In 1999, DuPont sold all of its Conoco shares, the business merging with
Phillips Petroleum Company. That year, CEO Chad Holliday switched the
company's focus towards growing DuPont chemicals from living plants rather
than processing them from petroleum.
