Finding Aids

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company more commonly known as the DuPont Company. It was established in 1802 and began by manufacturing gunpowder, later moving into chemical compounds. The company's Engineering Department was initially organized in 1903 as a division of the High Explosives Department, with the purpose of designing and constructing high explosives plants, powder machinery, and extensions to existing plants. This collection of DuPont Engineering records is fragmentary in nature. The surviving records are divided into four series that document a wide range of functions and represent several different time periods in the department’s evolution. The series are: Engineering Department history file; Engineering Research Laboratory; Construction Division; and Design Division, Corfam Poromeric Technology.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, the United States government initiated a massive effort to ensure that adequate supplies of essential materials would be readily available should the country's armed forces become actively engaged in military conflict. At the request of the Army Ordnance Department, the DuPont Company participated in these procurement programs by undertaking the design, construction, and operation of plants for the manufacture of military explosives and other chemical products essential to the successful prosecution of the war. The records of the Explosives Department consist of special reports to the Executive Committee, the files of general manager Edward B. Yancey, and the files of powder superintendent Charles E. Seymour.

The Indiana Ordnance Works was built by the DuPont Company for the U.S. Government beginning in 1940. It manufactured military explosives, propellants, and smokeless powder. This collection consists of photographs of the Ballistics Lab of the Indiana Ordnance Works.

The Indiana Ordnance Works was built by the DuPont Company for the U.S. Government beginning in 1940. It manufactured military explosives, propellants, and smokeless powder. The panoramic photographs show overviews of the Indiana Ordnance Works facilities, Charlestown, Indiana.

During World War II, the DuPont Company was contracted to produce smokeless powder, TNT and DNT explosives for the military. This panoramic photograph is a group portrait of uniformed guards at a military explosives plant in Memphis, Tennessee, 1941.

Wallis Gartside Hines (1919-2014) was a chemical engineer employed at the Kankakee Ordnance Works from 1942 to 1943, a war plant of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company located south of Joliet, Illinois. His notes describe the steps to be followed in the manufacture and refining of sodium and lead azide and for the laboratory analysis necessary for quality control.