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E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (NYSE: DD) was founded in July 1802 as a gun powder mill by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont on Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware, USA. DuPont is currently the world's second largest chemical company (behind BASF) in terms of market capitalization. It is also a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

In the twentieth century, DuPont led the polymer revolution by developing many highly successful materials such as Vespel, neoprene, nylon, Corian, Lucite, Teflon, Mylar, Kevlar, M5 fiber, Nomex, and Tyvek. DuPont has also been significantly involved in the refrigerant industry, developing and producing the Freon (CFCs) series and later, more environmentally-friendly refrigerants. In the paint and pigment industry, it has created synthetic pigments and paints, such as ChromaFlair.

DuPont is often successful in popularizing the brands of its material products such that their trademark names become more commonly used than the generic or chemical word(s) for the material itself. One example is “neoprene”, which was intended originally to be a trademark but quickly came into common usage.

History

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. ^[1]

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 Sherman 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 Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

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 acquistion, 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 Seagrams.

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.

Currently

Today, DuPont is a global science company with 2005 revenues of $26.6 billion, employs 60,000 people worldwide^[2] and is the 237th largest corporation in the United States^{citation needed]}. DuPont businesses are organized into the following five categories, known as marketing "platforms" - Electronic and Communication Technologies, Performance Materials, Coatings and Color Technologies, Safety and Protection, and Agriculture and Nutrition. In 2004 the company sold its textiles business to Koch Industries, losing some of its best-known brands such as Lycra (Spandex), Dacron polyester, Orlon acrylic, Antron nylon and Thermolite.

Corporate governance

Current board of directors

Controversies

Hemp

It is often asserted in pro-cannabis publications that DuPont actively supported the criminalization of the production of hemp in the US in 1937 through private and government intermediates, and alleged that this was done to eliminate hemp as a “superior” source of fiber — one of DuPont's biggest markets at the time.^[3]^[4]

Price fixing

In 1941, an investigation of Standard Oil Co. and IG Farben brought evidence concerning complex price and marketing agreements between DuPont, U.S. Industrial Alcohol Company, and their subsidiary Cuba Distilling Company. The investigation was eventually dropped, like dozens of others in many different kinds of industries, due to the need to enlist industry support in the war effort.^[5]

“Behind the nylon curtain”

In 1974, Gerard Colby Zilg, wrote Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain, a critical account of the role of the DuPont family in American social, political and economic history. The book was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974.

A DuPont family member obtained an advance copy of the manuscript and was “predictably outraged”. A DuPont official contacted The Fortune Book Club and stated that the book was “scurrilous” and “actionable” but produced no evidence to counter the charges. The Fortune Book Club (a subsidiary of the Book of the Month Club) reversed its decision to distribute Zilg's book. The editor-in-chief of the Book of the Month Club declared that the book was “malicious” and had an “objectionable tone”. Prentice-Hall removed several inaccurate passages from the page proofs of the book, and cut the first printing from 15,000 to 10,000 copies, stating that 5,000 copies no longer were needed for the book club distribution. The proposed advertising budget was reduced from $15,000 to $5,000.

Mr. Zilg sued Prentice-Hall (Zilg v. Prentice-Hall), accusing it of reneging on a contract to promote sales.

The Federal District Court ruled that PrenticeHall had privished the book (the company conducting an inadequate merchandising effort after concluding that the book did not meet its expectations as to quality or marketability) and breached its obligation to Zilg to exert its best efforts in promoting the book because the publisher had no valid business reason for reducing the first printing or the advertising budget. The court also ruled that the DuPont Company had a constitutionally protected interest in discussing its good faith opinion of the merits of Zilg's work with the book clubs and the publisher, and found that the company had not engaged in threats of economic coercion or baseless litigation.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the damages award in September of 1983. The court stated that, while DuPont's actions “surely” resulted in the book clubs' decision not to distribute Zilg's work and also resulted in a change in Prentice-Hall's previously supportive attitude toward the book, DuPont's conduct was not actionable. The court further stated that the contract did not contain an explicit “best efforts” or “promote fully” promise, much less an agreement to make certain specific promotional efforts. Printing and advertising decisions were within Prentice-Hall's discretion.

In 1984 Lyle Stuart re-released an extended version, Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain.^[6]

Chlorofluorocarbons

Along with General Motors, DuPont was the inventor of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), and the largest producer of these ozone depleting chemicals (used primarily in aerosol sprays and refrigerants) in the world, with a 25% market share in the late 1980s.

In 1974, responding to public concern about the safety of CFCs,^[7] Dupont promised in newspaper advertisements and congressional testimony to stop production of CFCs should they be proved to be harmful to the ozone layer. On 4 March 1988, U.S. Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.), and Robert T. Stafford (R-Vt.) officially wrote to DuPont, in their capacity as the leadership of the Congressional subcommittee on hazardous wastes and toxic substances, asking the company to keep its promise to completely stop CFC production (and to do so for most CFC types within one year) in light of the 1987 international Montreal Protocol for the global reduction of CFCs (signed for the United States by President Ronald Reagan). The Senators argued that “Dupont has a unique and special obligation” as the original developer of CFCs and the author of previous public assurances made by the company regarding the safety of CFCs. Dupont's response was that the senatorial demand was more drastic than the scientific evidence warranted, and that alternative chemicals were only in their infancy.^{citation needed]}

In a dramatic turnaround on 24 March 1988, DuPont announced that it would begin leaving the CFC business entirely after a 15 March NASA announcement that CFCs were not only creating a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica but also thinning the layer elsewhere in the world.

DuPont announced that it would stop selling CFCs with a full page ad in the 27 April 1992 New York Times stating “we will stop selling CFC's as soon as possible, but no later than year end 1995 in the US and other developed countries.”^[8]

In later years, Dupont would maintain that the company had taken the initiative in phasing out CFCs^[9] and in replacing CFCs with a new generation of refrigerant chemicals, such as HCFCs and HFCs.^[10] In 2003, Dupont was awarded the National Medal of Technology, recognizing the company as the leader in developing CFC replacements.

Iraq's nuclear program

In a report submitted by Saddam Hussein to the United Nations shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was revealed that DuPont had participated in Iraq's nuclear weapons program. (Though the U.S. attempted to redact the names of all U.S. companies involved, an uncensored copy was leaked to the press.)^[11]^[12] DuPont has not faced any sanctions because of this.

Positive recognition

DuPont has been a leading company in developing more environmentally friendly practices and products . In 2005, BusinessWeek magazine ranked DuPont as No.1 of "The Top Green Companies."^[13]

DuPont was twice awarded the National Medal of Technology, first in 1990, for its invention of "high-performance man-made polymers such as nylon, neoprene rubber, "Teflon" fluorocarbon resin, and a wide spectrum of new fibers, films, and engineering plastics"; the second for 2002 "for policy and technology leadership in the phaseout and replacement of chlorofluorocarbons."

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Contents

History

Currently

Corporate governance

Current board of directors

Controversies

Hemp

Price fixing

“Behind the nylon curtain”

Chlorofluorocarbons

Iraq's nuclear program

Positive recognition

Further reading

See also

External links

Notes

References