Finding Aids

Science and Corporate Strategy is a scholarly history of Research and Development at the DuPont Company authored by David A. Hounshell (1950-) and John Kenly Smith (1951-). The collection consists of research files compiled by Hounshell Smith for the purpose of writing the book. Research files include copies of correspondence, articles, reports, patents, chronologies, organizational charts, and contracts from the DuPont Company from 1903 though 1980.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company was established in 1802 by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) and his son Éleuthère Irénée du Pont (1771-1834). This collection of more than 1250 discrete photographs depicts the landscape and buildings at or near the company's explosives manufacturing plants along Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware. Approximately 900 images depict powder yard sites, including the DuPont Experimental Station, either during the mills' final decades of operation or prior to, during, and after excavation and restoration work on the site in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the remaining images depict the worker communities which surrounded the powder yards.

The DuPont Company's Executive Committee established the Experimental Station, a research facility located on the banks of the Brandywine Creek across from DuPont's first black powder works. The panoramic photograph provides an overview of the DuPont Company Experimental Station and Country Club, outside of Wilmington, Delaware. It shows temporary structures and construction for expansion of the Experimental Station.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company was established in 1802 by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) and his son Éleuthère Irénée du Pont (1771-1834). The du Ponts purchased a mill site on the banks of the Brandywine River just North of Wilmington, Delaware. The pulp keg mill, after the powder yards closed, was used for record storage by the DuPont Company. (Currently, it is a Hagley Museum and Library property, the Hall of Records.) In 1903, the DuPont Company's Executive Committee established the Experimental Station, a research facility located on the banks of the Brandywine Creek across from the du Pont's first black powder works. This collection consists of photographs and negatives from the DuPont Company's Secretary's Department showing the Hall of Records at various times and one aerial view of the Experimental Station.

Guy B. Taylor (1888-1972) worked at the DuPont Company, where he specialized in the oxidation of ammonia, the method of contact catalysis, and the synthesis of acetylene. His fragmentary papers document his career as a research chemist and include an autobiographical notebook that chronicles his life from childhood to retirement, Princeton dissertation on the dissociation of mercuric oxide, technical papers, patents, and papers from employment at DuPont's Experimental Station.