Finding Aids

Jackson Hunsicker (1948-2017) invented the Memo Mate in the mid-1990s. It was a small personal recording device that could store up to twenty seconds of audio. The Memo Mate was marketed as a handy way to remember appointments, phone numbers, directions, and the location of a car in a large parking lot. The Memo Mate was a successful invention, selling close to 10 million units. Hunsicker's papers on the patenting and marketing of Memo Mate document the typical process and pitfalls of patenting and marketing by a lone inventor. The collection consists of the legal correspondence of the patent application process and subsequent contractual disputes, along with schematics and designs, and possible names and logos. Hunsicker’s invention represents a demonstration of the patent process as well as a contribution from a woman inventor to the field.

A collection of bulletins and reports from the library of DuPont's Jackson Laboratory. Most were generated by the Organic Chemicals Department, which operated Jackson Laboratory, but others come from other DuPont Departments and their laboratories.

Jackson Laboratory was a dye works established in 1917 by E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont Company. The records of the Jackson Laboratory are fragmentary in nature and divided into two series that document cutting-edge research projects conducted by DuPont scientists, primarily in the 1920s and 1930s. Under the direction of Fletcher B. Holmes (1877-1961) and W. S. Calcott (1892-1952), the processes for producing many important products, including neoprene synthetic rubber, were perfected during this period.

This handbill for the Jackson Park Garage on Stony Island Avenue in Chicago advertises its mechanical services and lists monthly specials for Ford 4, Chevrolet 6, and Pontiac 6 automobiles. The NRA (National Recovery Administration) eagle symbol is in the right corner. The National Recovery Administration was a U.S. government agency established during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to stimulate business recovery through fair-practice codes. Companies that subscribed to the NRA codes were allowed to display a Blue Eagle emblem, as a symbol of cooperation with the NRA.

Jacquelin Lee McConaughey (1920-2001) was an artist and longtime employee of the DuPont Company. This collection consists of three photographic prints of her paintings that she created for the DuPont Company's Environmental Color System.

The DuPont Experimental Station is a large industrial research facility founded in 1903; focused on chemistry research. James Bailey was an employee at the DuPont Company for forty years. The materials in this small collection consist of photographs, videos and ephemera related to the DuPont Company.

James Burton Nichols (1902-1995) was a chemist at the DuPont Company, a chemical research and manufacturing company. He worked at DuPont from 1927 to 1967, researching polymers, pigments, and ultracentrifugation. The Nichols papers include research papers and publications describing research work on the ultracentrifuge, colloid, and polymer chemistry projects.

James F. Allee Jr. (1884-1956), was a lawyer and publisher from Dover, in Kent County, Delaware. This collection contains six photographic prints from the J.F. Allee papers.

James Gibbons of New Castle County, Delaware, was a powder worker at E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company. This collection contains his certificate of naturalization, dated October 8, 1860, issued by the District Court held at Wilmington for the District of Delaware.

James Gordon Ferguson (1900-1985) was an electrical engineer who worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories for forty-two years. He was the author of numerous technical papers and was one of the leads during the 1940s in developing the Number Five Crossbar Switching System (5XB switch), which brought telephone service to rural areas. This item is an unpublished memoir entitled "Me and My Bell System (As I Remember Us)," circa 1965. It details Ferguson's career and professional life.

James Henry Yeager (1911-1986) was the industrial photographer for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation for thirty years, between 1946 and 1976. The first half of this collection contains photographs taken by James H. Yeager during his tenure at Bethlehem Steel as industrial photographer. The second half the this collection consists of photos and slides taken by Yeager while traveling in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, and to a lesser degree Washington, DC and the southern United States.

James J. McGillan (1941-2013) was a lawyer and businessman who specialized in corporate transactions and telecommunications systems. He was co-founder of Private Transatlantic Telecommunications System, Inc. (PTAT), which constructed the first privately owned transatlantic fiber optic telecommunications cable from the United States and England. Later, he was co-founder of Med-Tel International Corp., which operated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) clinics in the U.S. and United Kingdom. McGillan's papers largely include the corporate records of both PTAT and Med-Tel International, documenting corporate buyout policies and transactions, high level executive and managerial decision making, federal licensing, and corporate law within the telecommunications industry.

James L. Lovell (1896-1984) worked for the DuPont Company as an exhibition marksman in the Sporting Powders Division. His papers include items from his career with the DuPont Company, primarily during his years in the Sporting Powders Division, but also items related to trapshooting.

James Porter Baughman (1936-) was a professor of business history at the Harvard Business School and later served as director of Crotonville, The General Electric Company's management development institute in Ossining, New York. His academic research was in the study of management strategy and structure, and following his tenure at Harvard, his position at General Electric gave him the opportunity to implement various business management concepts that he developed during his teaching years. The collection consists of news clippings and original documents amassed by Baughman for his studies of strategic planning and management structure at General Electric.

James Porter Baughman (1936-) was a professor of business history at the Harvard Business School and later served as director of Crotonville, The General Electric Company's management development institute in Ossining, New York. He also consulted for numerous private and public firms. His papers describe the successful career of a renowned business manager, lecturer, consultant, and world wide resource for developing future business management practices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

James Porter Baughman (1936-) was a professor of business history at the Harvard Business School and later served as director of Crotonville, The General Electric Company's management development institute in Ossining, New York. This collection of Baughman's personal and professional papers documents some of his teaching career at Harvard Business School. However, the bulk of the collection is papers generated during his consulting and teaching work at General Electric.

The Joy Manufacturing Company was a major manufacturer of underground mining and materials handling machinery. The photographs were collected by retired corporate secretary James Packer (1920-2008) in 1985 for the purpose of writing a company history. This small collection consists of photographs, mostly group portraits of staff. The collection dates range from the 1921 to 1988. The materials are so sporadic that there is no bulk date.

The Winterthur estate is now known as Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library located in Wilmington, Delaware. The estate is the former home of Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969) who was born there on May 27, 1880, the son of Henry Algernon du Pont and the great-grandson of E.I. du Pont, the founder of the DuPont Company. These postcards show the estate at Winterthur, a garden walkway, and a metal sundial in a Winterthur garden as photographed in 1908.

James R. Thomen (1926-) was manager of the Experimental Station from 1975 to 1985 when he retired. The DuPont Company's Experimental initially, was to be a small laboratory to screen inventions which were coming into the company from outside independent inventors specifically for research on black powder, smokeless powder, and dynamite, but soon its mission was altered and it became a large industrial research facility focused on innovative advancements in chemistry. This collection consists primarily of photographs of buildings at the Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware taken between 1910 and 1950.

James W. Flaherty Inc. was a general contractor company in Wilmington, Delaware that operated between 1949 and 1983. Consists of drawings and plans for various local properties, including du Pont family estates.

From 1906 to the 1970s, the Honeywell corporation grew from specializing in thermostats and home heating into military engineering, cameras and computing. James Warren Scarlett (1937-2016) was a team leader and electrical engineer at Honeywell through the crucial 1970s period where they led the world in developing process control technology for industrial plants. His records illustrate the development of Honeywell's Industrial Process Control Division's TDC 2000 and TDC 3000 systems. The collection has particular strengths in materials documenting the design of the user interface, sometimes referred to as the man-machine-interface (MMI). Materials include reports, papers, presentation slides, books, correspondence, and business cards.

This collection consists of glass plate negatives showing scenes from Carbon County, Pennsylvania during the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as a selection of archival prints. The majority of the images show scenes from Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) and the surrounding area, the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, and the waterfalls at Glen Onoko.

Jane Farson (1704-1792) ran an unidentified shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The letter is from Farson to Samuel Coates (1748-1830), a Philadelphia merchant, regarding her shop and small house and large lot in Wilmington.

Janet Starr Whitson Sudler (1908-1994) and Arthur Emory Sudler Jr. (1905-1968) were a commercial artist couple who married in 1927. This small collection consists of sketches and advertisements, primarily of women's millinery and fashion from the 1930s in flapper-era style.

Jasper Crane (1881-1969) was an executive with E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company and a noted Presbyterian layman. Crane's personal papers are primarily concerned with his political activities. This collection consists largely of Crane's correspondence with public officials and conservative organizations, who, like Crane, actively opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the activist state that emerged from the Second World War.

David Jayne (1798-1866) purchased a drug store in Philadelphia in 1836. His patent medicine business grew quickly and he built this new building in 1850. The building was designed by American architects, William J. Johnston (1811-1849) and Thomas U. Walter (1804-1887) and was located at 242 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The firm of Dr. D. Jayne and Son was one of the largest patent medicine firms in the United States, and this building was "the most conspicuous building of the time" in Philadelphia. Engraved on wood and printed by William B. Gihon (dates unknown), an illustrator and engraver.

Campbell Waterwheel Company specialized in traditional water wheels and how they could be used as esthetic elements in the landscape. Consequently, much of the company's work was for decorative power plants for private estates or for historic restorations. The collection consists of photographs of an unidentified electrically-powered water wheel.

Campbell Waterwheel Company specialized in traditional water wheels and how they could be used as esthetic elements in the landscape. Consequently, much of the company's work was for decorative power plants for private estates or for historic restorations. The collection consists of graphic materials related to J.B. Campbell and the Campbell Water Wheel Company. The bulk of the collection contains photographs of company projects, arranged alphabetically by client or contractor name. These include views of water wheels, turbines, and water supply systems during various stages of installation. There are also views of mills, dams, flumes, hydroelectric power plants, irrigation gates, swimming pools, and hydraulic machinery.

The leather manufacturing firm of J.E. Rhoads & Sons grew out of an eighteenth-century tanning operation on the Rhoads family homestead in Marple, Chester County (now Delaware County), Pennsylvania. This collection contains various historical items related to the Rhoads family and their leather business, such as a deed to John Rhoads (1639-1701), correspondence regarding tanning business, paper on Rhoads homestead, and early business, and items related to the 275th anniversary of J.E. Rhoads & Sons Inc.

The leather manufacturing firm of J.E. Rhoads & Sons grew out of an eighteenth-century tanning operation on the Rhoads family homestead in Marple, Chester County (now Delaware County), Pennsylvania. The miscellany contains ledgers, a list of leather dealers in the northeast, correspondence regarding an order of belts by the DuPont Company, and other loose papers, such as bills and receipts.

The leather manufacturing firm of J.E. Rhoads & Sons grew out of an eighteenth-century tanning operation on the Rhoads family homestead in Marple, Chester County (now Delaware County), Pa. Records cover the entire history of the firm from the 1720s through the 1960s. There is also substantial information on trade organizations in the leather industry and on members of the Rhoads family.

Jean Kane Foulke du Pont (1891-1985) was a suffragette, prison reform activist, philanthropist, and wife of E. Paul du Pont (1887-1950). The collection contains three photocopied volumes of her ancestry of many of the earliest families of New Netherland and colonial Pennsylvania. The volumes include an introduction, genealogy tables, reproductions of paintings and photographs, and family lore collected by the author over the preceding sixty-eight years. There is an index at the end of volume three.

Jean Kane Foulke du Pont (1891-1985) was a suffragette, prison reform activist, philanthropist, and wife of E. Paul du Pont (1887-1950). The collection contains invitations, mostly to weddings, but also to cocktail parties and debutante balls.

Jervis Langdon, Jr. (1905-2004) was a railroad executive largely known for rehabilitating ailing railroads and for his influence in the reshaping of national railroad policy in the 1970s. Langdon's papers document the U.S. railroad industry's efforts to obtain a competitive rate rule through Congress in relation to other freight carriers, such as trucks and barges. Also included is material covering Langdon's efforts in revitalizing bankrupt railroads, such as the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific, and the Penn Central reorganization and its subsequent 1980 valuation case.

Jill Jonnes (1952-) is a freelance writer who has published a number of books on technology and society, including Conquering Gotham in 2007, which is an account of the design and construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad's New York improvements. The collection is comprised of Jonnes' research notes for writing the book, almost entirely of photocopies of letters, reports, newspaper articles, and extracts from books.

James "Jim" Joseph Dallas, Sr. (1932-2019) was a photographer employed by the DuPont Company, a chemical company. He worked at DuPont for ten years before opening his own industrial and commercial photography business, Dallas Studios based in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1968, Dallas also worked as a freelance commercial and industrial photographer. Companies such as the Speakman Company, Strescon Industries, Cytometrics Incorporated, and ICI America Incorporated are just a few of the industries he worked for. This collection consists of images from Jim Dallas’ assignments primarily for the DuPont Company. The collection of negatives and photographic prints are arranged into five different sereis: I. Sites, II. Products, III. Advertisements and publications, IV. Events and meetings, and V. People.

Job T. Pugh, Inc. was a small specialty tool manufacturer of augers and bits located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The firm was incorporated under the laws of Delaware on August 30, 1917, succeeding a partnership of the same name. It was dissolved in 1954. The records of Job T. Pugh, Inc., and its unincorporated predecessors are a series of fragments. The collection documents the financial and legal matters associated with operating a tool manufacturing business in the early twentieth century.

John A. Bader II (1895-1961) was a Wilmington, Delaware, building contractor active during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The records are primarily Bader's business papers. The collection includes engineer's field books, diaries of trips, and job notes. Eight volumes contain profit and loss statements, cost accounting for jobs, records of checks paid, and files on individual construction jobs.

John B. Lovis (1935-2015) was a longtime employee of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, where he assisted in the design and engineering of the Burns Harbor Plant and held various positions in the company's Corporate Engineering and Planning Department before his retirement as Director, Strategic Planning, in 1995. The collection consists of an unpublished paper prepared in 2007 on the closure of the steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and a revision of that paper delivered at Lehigh University in 2014.

The records consist of materials collected by John B. Lovis (1935-2015) for the writing of his book on the history of the Sparrows Point Plant, plus original Bethlehem Steel documents from his tenure in the Corporate Planning Department.

The John B. Stetson Company was a manufacturer of hats. The company was founded in 1865 by John B. Stetson (1830-1906) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The company's Kensington plant consisted of twenty-five buildings covering nine acres at Germantown and Montgomery Avenues. During its heyday in the 1920s it employed over 5,000 people to make its hats. This is a small collection of photographs and other material relating to the company. The photographs focus on the workers in and around the factory and its amenities.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company was established in 1802. The du Pont family purchased a mill site on the banks of the Brandywine River just North of Wilmington, Delaware for the production of black powder. In 1902 the DuPont Company acquired the Smith Electric Fuze Company and some other properties in the Pompton Lakes, New Jersey area. The DuPont Company also operated a dynamite plant near Hancock, Michigan. This collection consists of snapshot photographs from the works at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, and others from a plant in Michigan, most likely the Senter dynamite works near Hancock, Michigan.

John Elgar was a Quaker master mechanic employed in the York, Pa., foundry of Phineas Davis, Israel Gartner and James Webb. The letter is an order for sheet iron used to build the hull of the steamboat Codorus.

John Foster Tucker III (1950-2008) was a Philadelphia-born rail transit operating official and rail history enthusiast. This collection consists of photographs of trolleys, trains, rails lines, and rail stations in Philadelphia and the city's Pennsylvania suburbs, as well as offices, maintenance shops, and garages used by transit authorities. Most of the collection is devoted to SEPTA, but predecessor companies PTC (Philadelphia Transportation Company) and PSTC (Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company) are also represented.

The John F. Tucker Transit History Collection consists of official documents produced or used by Mr. Tucker during his career as a public transit official, records of the pre-SEPTA Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company (1907-1939) and the Philadelphia Transportation Company (1940-1968) that he preserved from loss or destruction, and materials collected out of his interest in the history of transit systems, particularly electric traction lines. The collection traces the evolution of the Philadelphia transit system, its extent, routes and services, and of North American rail rapid transit generally.

John Farrell Metten (1873-1968) was a marine engineer and shipbuilding industry executive. This collection contains photographic prints, postcards, documents, drawings, and an identification card pertaining to the career of John Farrell Metten and views of Naval ships built at the New York Shipbuilding Company, Camden, New Jersey.

John G. Townsend Jr. (1871-1964) was a politician, a businessman, and a banker. He served as Governor of Delaware from 1917 to 1921 and as Delaware’s U.S. Senator from 1929 to 1941. He operated a lumber business, cannery, orchard, and then a large poultry farm called Townsend Inc. Farms. This small collection documents Townsend’s work in politics and in the poultry industry. There is a fair amount of biographical information authored by Louise Stanton Johnson, who worked as Townsend’s secretary during his time as Senator. The collection has been arranged into four series: Governor and Senatorial papers; Townsend Inc. Farms records; Louise Stanton Johnson papers and Printing plates and seals. The materials in the collection date from 1908 to 1977, with a bulk of the materials from the 1930s through the 1950s.

The John Gordon Rideout papers illustrate the career of John Gordon "Jack" Rideout (1898-1951), a noted industrial designer. Rideout began his career in sales, moved into advertising, and eventually opened industrial design firms in Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio. Highlights of the collection are images of Skippy Racer, perfume atomizers designed for DeVilbiss, the Shell-Back metal chair designed for Calumet Chair Company, and his classic re-design of Magnalite Cookware for the Wagner Manufacturing Company.

The John Horn Printing Company was a printing firm that specialized in printing labels and ribbons. This sample album contains 131 embossed die-cut labels pasted on thirty-two pages for a variety of products.

John Joseph Beer (1927-) was a professor of the history of science and chemistry at the University of Delaware until his retirement in 1992. Beer played a major role in developing the university’s program in the history of technology and the Hagley Fellowship Program. The bulk of the papers consists of correspondence, notes, research materials, and drafts for a projected book or article on "Russia iron," a highly finished, wear-resistant iron produced in Russia during the nineteenth century.