Du Ponts Research Articles

Failed utopias and practical chemistry: the Priestleys, the Du Ponts, and the transmission of transatlantic science, 1770–1820

ABSTRACTEighteenth-century events, replete with Dickensian dualities, brought two Enlightenment families to America. Pierre-Samuel du Pont and Joseph Priestley contemplated relocating their families decades before immigrating. After arriving, they discovered deficiencies in education and chemistry. Their experiences were indicative of the challenges in transmitting transatlantic chemistry. The Priestleys were primed to found an American chemical legacy. Science connected Priestley to British manufacturers, Continental chemists, and American statesmen. Priestley's marriage into the Wilkinson ironmaster dynasty, and Lunar Society membership, helped his sons apprentice, and befriend manufacturer-chemist Thomas Cooper. However, ideological persecution forced them from England. Priestley's plans for his sons to inherit Wilkinson's ironworks evaporated; in America, efforts to establish manufactories, colonies, farms, and a college miscarried. Cooper taught college chemistry, but his materialism provoked dismissals. The Du Ponts were unlikely founders of an industrial-chemistry empire. Du Pont's philosophy promulgated that agriculture, not industry, produced wealth. Eleuthère-Irénée apprenticed in France's gunpowder administration, however, plans for his succession died and director Antoine Lavoisier, a family friend, was executed. E.-I. and Du Pont's arrest precipitated relocation to America. Du Pont's utopian colony and schemes proved unrealistic. Nevertheless, E.-I.'s gunpowder manufactory—utilizing transatlantic contacts and privileged knowledge of advanced French chemistry—succeeded through practical application.

The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait

The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait

The Senate Munitions Inquiry of the 1930s: Beyond the Merchants of Death.

Preface Perspectives on the Munitions Inquiry and the Interwar Years The Formation of the Munitions Committee, August 1933 to August 1934 The Roosevelt Administration, the Du Ponts, and the First Munitions Hearings, August 1934 to December 1934 Examining the Du Ponts, December 1934 to January 1935 Shipbuilding and War Profits: Discovering the Impact of Total War in Modern Society, January 1935 to April 1935 From the Early Thirties to the Later Thirties: Crossing the Divide, April 1935 to January 1936 The Munitions Committee in a New World: Examining World War I Finance, January 1936 to February 1936 Beyond the Merchants of Death: Recovering the History of the Munitions Committee Selected Bibliography Index

Du Pont, EPA Investigate Possible Role Of Fungicide in Crop Deaths

It may remain one of the greatest mysteries of modern agriculture. Just over a year ago, some greenhouse plant growers noticed it. Then larger scale farmers of fruits and vegetables noticed it. Their crops were shriveling, twisting, and dying. The only factor they had in common was treatment by Du Pont fungicide Benlate— not a new product but one used for 20 years with few problems. Although the fungicide is strongly implicated in the crop deaths, after a year of frustrating investigations, no one has been able to find out why the crops died or how the fungicide may have caused it. But Du Pont, meanwhile, has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in claims settlements. Benlate is Du Ponts tradename for a broad-acting, systemic fungicide the company has made since 1969. The compound, methyl l-(butylcarbamoyl)-2- benzimidazolecarbamate, is known generically as benomyl. It is the best known of several fungicides of a group called ...

The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925-1940.

The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925-1940.

The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925-1940.

Preface 1. Barons of the Brandywine 2. Anti-Insurgent Politics 3. The Opening Wedge of Tyranny 4. A State of Revolution 5. Depression and New Opportunities 6. Uncertain Victory 7. A Brief Honeymoon 8. Deserting the Ship of State 9. Launching the Liberty League 10. Disintegration and Rebirth 11. Mobilizing for Armageddon 12. Taking a Walk 13. A Rout and a Valley Forge 14. A Last Hurrah 15. Old Soldiers Notes Index

Alfred I. du Pont: The Man and His Family by Joseph Frazier Wall

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1119 Fitzgerald concludes that hybrid corn was not a uniform benefit to all farmers, that purchased seed (and other bought inputs) contrib­ uted to farmers’ economic dependency, and that the persistent interest in improving yields resulted in chronic overproduction. These are conclusions that some people, including myself, see in a different light. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s story of hybrid corn is a splendid prologue to our own age of biotechnology and to a future where wholly “new” life-forms may make our current agricultural policy thinking completely irrelevant. G. Terry Sharrer Dr. Sharrer is curator of agriculture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Alfred I. du Pont: The Man and His Family. By Joseph Frazier Wall. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 685; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95. The story of the du Pont family must be the longest-running soap opera in American history. Since the early 18th century, it has teemed with loves and lusts, fierce battles over wealth and power, all-consuming hatreds, social rivalries, and episodes of internecine warfare spilling out from bedroom to boardroom. What lifts these clashes of egos and passions above the ordinary is the fact that they revolve around one of the oldest and most successful business enterprises in the nation. In this century, the decisive contest involved three cousins whose joint rule of the parent firm was shattered in 1911 when Pierre S. and T. Coleman du Pont ousted Alfred I. du Pont from the triumvirate. The business and social conflagration among them lasted for decades and has caught up biographers and historians like seconds at a duel. Alfred D. Chandler and Stephen Salsbury’s widely praised study of Pierre (1971) swept the held from an early (1941) defense of Alfred by Marquis James. Now Joseph Frazier Wall seeks to redress the damage done Alfred’s reputation in this full and sympathetic biography. Aware that the du Ponts have always been prisoners of their heritage, Wall opens with a vivid and informative review of the two generations preceding Alfred and closes with an account of Alfred’s legacy as expressed in his will and what its executors did with it. The treatment of Alfred’s life, organized in chronological chunks similar to those in Wall’s biography of Andrew Carnegie, includes sketches of a full roster of du Ponts. Some readers will object to the wealth of detail on family matters, yet it succeeds in conveying the often smothering nature of relationships among them and the depth of their feelings about each other’s foibles. 1120 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Students of technology and culture will find Wall’s study both absorbing and frustrating. Although Alfred’s life is filled with inter­ esting and important activities, it has neither a straight line nor a pinnacle of accomplishment to give it focus. Wall makes a persuasive case that Alfred was not a reactionary devoted to black powder at Du Pont, and that he could be an innovative thinker, but after the power struggle he ceased to be a factor in the company. His later business endeavors, especially his banking and development work in Florida, and his political forays in Delaware were significant and enduring but left no giant imprint. The result is a revealing portrait of a difficult and complex subject who was neither attractive nor a shaper of his age. What ultimately makes the book worthwhile to readers of this journal is the range of insights it offers into the ways human foibles intrude on affairs that scholars prefer to package as tidy, logical developments. Where Chandler and Salsbury stress the role played by Pierre du Pont in the creation of the modern corporation, Wall demonstrates through Alfred’s life how passion, ambition, greed, vengeance, family con­ flicts, and other irrational forces can shape the larger structure of events. At first glance the modern enterprise may look to be rational, the decisions of its managers rational, and the role of technology imper­ sonal, but behind this neutral facade the guiding hands are often flawed by raging contradictions and influences that are neither linear nor logical. The strange career of...

The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925-1940.

The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925-1940.

The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925-1940

The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925-1940

The corporate state and the broker state: the Du Ponts and American national politics, 1925-1940

The corporate state and the broker state: the Du Ponts and American national politics, 1925-1940

In Memory of N. V. Sivachev

I first met Nikolai Sivachev in early 1975, when he delivered a rather orthodox lecture on the New Deal to a student audience at the University of Maryland. Radical students immediately condemned him for failing to recognize that American society is managed by the Du Ponts, Rockefellers, and other corporate families and that American politics and elections are essentially irrelevant. Answering them with imperturbable good humor, Sivachev demonstrated clearly that he knew more American history than his young critics.

Du Ponts 12-carbon cyclic triene offers your R&D new ways to make bigger and better molecules.

RETURN TO ISSUEPREVAdvertisementDu Ponts 12-carbon cyclic triene offers your R&D new ways to make bigger and better molecules.Cite this: Chem. Eng. News 1981, 59, 24, obcPublication Date (Print):June 15, 1981Publication History Published online7 November 2010Published inissue 15 June 1981https://doi.org/10.1021/cen-v059n024.obcCopyright © 1981 American Chemical SocietyArticle Views59Altmetric-Citations-LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (290 KB) SUBJECTS:Molecules Get e-Alerts

Explore Du Ponts polar solvent and intermediate for surprising R & D answers and production economies.

Explore Du Ponts polar solvent and intermediate for surprising R & D answers and production economies.

Causes and Circumstances of the Du Pont Family's Emigration

Despite the numerous books and articles on the Du Pont family's life in France and in the United States, explanations of the causes and circumstances of the family's emigration to the United States are sketchy and often misleading. The Du Ponts have as often as not been included among the 6migres or refugees of the French Revolution. William S. Dutton, in his book, Du Pont: One Hundred and Forty Years, expresses this view most explicitly when he characterizes E. I. du Pont as a refugee fleeing from a French dictatorship.' This article tells the story behind the Du Pont family's decision in 1797 to leave France and describes the circumstances under which they actually left two years later. The story begins in Paris with the coup d'etat of September 4, 1797.2