Finding Aids

The Cavalcade of America television show was an anthology drama which aired on NBC from 1952 to 1953 and ABC from 1953 to 1957. The show was adapted from a radio show of the same name sponsored by the DuPont Company, a chemical company, which began as a manufacturer of gunpowder in 1802.This collections consists of two reels of television commercials for various DuPont products. The commercials feature various spokesmen talking about or demonstrating the products. One commercial features DuPont Company president Crawford Greenewalt.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company, which began as a manufacturer of gunpowder in 1802. In 1939, the Seaford Plant was created by the DuPont Company near Seaford, Delaware to be the world’s first nylon plant. Dr. Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) first produced Nylon at the DuPont Experimental Station in 1935. After determining that low-cost production was possible, the DuPont Company set out to build a plant to produce its first product, women's nylon hosiery. Seaford lost many of its first male employees to the war effort, but female workers oversaw the production of nylon for parachutes and B-29 bomber tires. After World War II, the plant was an important part of the DuPont Company’s textile fiber program. One of the production units was converted into a pilot plant in 1948 for “Fiber X”, later to be introduced as Dacron. In the mid-1980s, DuPont began downsizing at the plant and by 2003, sold its synthetic fiber division Invista, to Koch Industries, Inc. in a deal that included the Seaford plant. This collection documents nylon production at the DuPont Company Seaford plant in Seaford, Delaware. It contains photographs, negatives, pamphlets, two 16mm films and one VHS videocassette. The photographs and negatives document the exterior, employees, production of Nylon and miscellaneous activities at the Seaford plant and products created from nylon. The pamphlets were made by the DuPont Company and cover subjects such as world trade, research and pollution control. One pamphlet is specifically about the Seaford nylon plant. The film “Seaford Plant Start-Up” and film transfer on videocassette, document the opening of the plant on November 1, 1939 as well as some production when the plant opened on December 12, 1939.

Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) was a chemist and inventor of Neoprene artificial rubber and Nylon synthetic fiber. He worked as a chemist in E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company's Fundamental Research Program from 1928 until his death in 1937. This small collection consists of Carothers' professional and technical correspondence, primarily with colleagues in the Chemistry Department at Iowa State University, Harvard, and the DuPont Company. The papers describe the DuPont Company's recruitment of Carothers and his work on polymerization, which led to the development of Nylon.