E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont Company. The company was established in 1802 by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) and his son Éleuthère Irénée du Pont (1771-1834); the company began with the production of gunpowder. In 1919, the DuPont Company created a room dedicated to large charts showing important financial statistics for its explosives business and emerging chemical ventures. The Chart Room was located on the ninth floor of the DuPont Building in Wilmington, nearby the offices of Executive Committee members.

The room contained charts tracking sales, expenses, earnings, assets, and other financial information against current and past fiscal years. Additional charts also tracked sales and other financial information by month and included forecasts.

As DuPont expanded, the number and complexity of the charts also grew, requiring new methods of presenting the data. The company installed a monorail system that suspended the charts so that they could be more easily accessed and viewed. The room was also outfitted with a small amphitheater with tiered seating that allowed departmental managers to sit in on the presentations of the chart room supervisor.

By the early 1970s, the use of the Chart Room had declined, largely due to the adoption of new printing and reproduction technologies like the Xerox® copy machine, along with the growing use of overhead projectors. Before his retirement, Charles B. McCoy (1909-1995), DuPont’s CEO from 1967 to 1973, replaced the Chart Room with printed information booklets distributed to the Executive Committee and Board of Directors.