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 is a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont Company. The DuPont Experimental Station is a large industrial research facility founded in 1903; it is focused on chemistry research. This small collection consists of organizational charts arranged chronologically, dating between 1942 and 1982.

Edwin A. Gee (1920-2013) was trained as a chemical engineer and worked as a metallurgist for the United States Bureau of Mines before joining the DuPont Company in 1948. The papers of Edwin A. Gee are incomplete and represent only a small portion of his work in the Development Department and as a member of the Executive Committee. The surviving records have been arranged in two series that document Gee's involvement in important phases of the company's history: Patent documentation and Diversification and research and development strategy.

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-). As part of their research, Hounshell and Smith conducted sixty-one oral history interviews with forty-seven current and former chemical engineers involved in DuPont's R & D programs. The interviews constitute an exhaustive first-person account of DuPont's research programs with special emphasis on personalities and the organizational culture of the various DuPont research facilities.

Howard Ensign Simmons Jr. (1929-1997) was an industrial scientist and the Research Vice-President in the Central Research Department of the DuPont Company from 1979 until his retirement in 1991. His records document Simmons's role in overseeing the production of "Science and Corporate Stategy" by David A. Hounshell and John K. Smith, a scholarly history of Research and Development at the DuPont Company. Also included are reports on DuPont's diversification program in the late 1960s.