DuPont

E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (DuPont) is an American chemical company, the second largest chemical company in the world by market capitalization, the fourth in revenue, and somewhat more ignominiously, the country's leading air polluter. Founded as a gunpowder company, DuPont led the 20th-century revolution in polymers and has recently entered into a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to develop adequate risk assessment for nanotechnology products.

French-born industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, a refugee from the French Revolution, imported gunpowder machinery from France to Wilmington, Delaware, to found his gunpowder mill in 1802. The company expanded when du Pont realized that the United States was lagging behind Europe in the Industrial Revolution, and by the time of the Civil War, his company has become the leading supplier of gunpowder to the American military, providing most of the powder used by the Union Army. Dynamite and smokeless powder followed, and when three of Éleuthère's great-grandsons bought the company from its managing partners in 1902, they began expanding rapidly. Their acquisition of other chemical companies triggered an antitrust investigation, which ruled that they had gained a monopoly over the explosives industry, requiring the divestment of some of their assets in the form of the Hercules Powder Company and the Atlas Powder Company—now Hercules, Inc., and AstraZeneca, respectively.

Materials science soon eclipsed explosives in importance, and from the late 1920s to the 1930s, DuPont's team, led by organic chemist Wallace Carothers, developed neoprene (the first synthetic rubber), a polyester superpolymer, nylon, Lucite (a hard plastic sold under brand names including Plexiglas), and nonstick coating Teflon—substances still common and still household names today. World War II brought major military contracts, not only for gunpowder and explosives, but for parachutes, tires, and other equipment. DuPont was instrumental in the Manhattan Project, and in later decades provided materials to the Apollo space program. Mylar, Dacron, Lycra, Corian, and Tyvek joined the DuPont line of synthetic materials in the 1950s and 1960s, and when Kevlar was developed, DuPont quickly became one of the most important manufacturers of body armor, supplying military and police forces around the world.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, DuPont benefited from its 1981 acquisition of oil and natural gas company Conoco Inc., which gave it easy access to the petroleum needed to manufacture many of its plastics and polymers. (Something of the scale of DuPont's chemical operations is indicated by the fact that the action that made it one of the country's 10 biggest petroleum producers was taken for the sake of such ancillary benefits.) In 1999, the company sold its interest in Conoco, which subsequently merged with the Phillips Petroleum Company. Getting out of the petroleum business was part of then-CEO (and current chairman) Charles Holliday's commitment to sustainable development, with the hopes of producing more materials derived from plants instead of petroleum. In another shift of focus, the textiles business was sold in 2004 to Koch Industries; DuPont textiles included Dacron polyester, Orlon acrylic, Thermolite Lycra, and Lycra.