Finding Aids

Donald Robert Hull (1911-1995) was a longtime employee at the DuPont Company mainly working with nylon and textile fibers. The collection pertains to his work at DuPont and Hull's consulting firm, Fiber Concepts, Inc.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont company. The Chamber Works was constructed as a dyeworks at Deepwater Point, New Jersey, in 1914. This small collection consists of materials about dyes and dyeing maintained by the analytical services technical supervisor at Chambers Works. Included are dye notebooks on silk, knitting, and hosiery; dye methods; a nylon textiles report; modern dye chemistry lecture notes; and translations of the Azo dye sections of a seminal German publication, "Fortschritte der Teerfarbenfabrikation," by P. Friedlaender.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company was a chemical company and began a research program in dyes in 1916. By the late 1920s the DuPont Company was one of the four major U.S. dye producers and controlled twenty-five percent of the market. The records consist of notebooks and procedures on dyes, which describe the colors, uses, applications, tests, and fastness and dying properties for dyes manufactured by DuPont and its competitors.

Gordon Derby Patterson (1897-1982) was a chemist who spent nearly forty years with the Central Research Department (formerly the Chemical Department) at the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont Company. In addition to his early work in pigments and rayon, Patterson directed research in high-energy radiation generators, radioactive tracer techniques, nuclear magnetic resonance, electron microscopy, and absorption spectroscopy. His papers provide extensive documentation for these projects, giving particular emphasis on ideas and suggestions for possible areas of exploration. In addition, there are administrative records, including outlines for research directors and the Steering Committee reviewing the status of current and proposed projects, as well as technical reference materials, such as summary reports, scientific papers, and literature reviews.

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.

Joseph Bancroft & Sons Company began operation in 1831 as a cotton cloth manufacturer in Rockford, Delaware. After the Civil War, the company concentrated on finishing cotton cloth. In later years it became famous for its Ban-lon artificial fiber but eventually withdrew from manufacturing in favor of licensing its processes and trademarks to other companies. The records consist of miscellaneous correspondence and reports, possibly from W. Ralph MacIntyre (1897-1984), president. The records include research reports and notebooks on dyeing, bleaching, printing, and finishing of fabrics.

Joseph W. Lynch was a textile chemist at the DuPont Company from 1954 to 1994. Lynch's papers document his forty-year career at DuPont. Some company records in Lynch's possession antedate his employment, while others describe his job searches from 1952 to 1954. The bulk of the records deal with customer relations, including identifying and resolving problems concerning DuPont's textile fiber products and providing technical assistance to customers.