Word: ponte
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...Brandywine's Banks. Eleuthèree Irénée du Pont de Nemours was a young Frenchman* who had studied gunpowder-making under France's great chemist Lavoisier, had become inspector general of commerce under King Louis XVI. When revolutionary mobs stormed the Tuileries in 1791, Irénée and Papa Pierre led 60 volunteers who defended the King until only they and six others were left alive. They escaped, later sailed to the U.S. There, young Irénée, amazed at the high price and low quality of gunpowder, raised...
...Soon Du Pont's peacetime business soared far above even the war years. Nitrocellulose, used for gun cotton, proved to be the source of peacetime wonders. It led to Duco to rayon and to cellophane-the latter two based on French patents. The French thought they were sticking Du Pont with a useless novelty in cellophane (the stuff came apart when wet). But Du Pont's researchers discovered how to waterproof it (a variant of Duco did the trick), and built such a market that by 1939 cellophane was one of Du Pont's biggest-selling products...
...Frontiers. The Du Pont revolution is still growing. President Greenewalt himself has been testing a new suit, made of Du Pont's newest synthetic fiber, Dacron. It looks and feels like wool, but outwears it, costs only half as much, is washable and mothproof-and is virtually wrinkleproof. Says Greenewalt: "The only way you can get the crease out is with an iron...
...Pont is now completing a new plant at Kingston, N.C. to put Dacron into mass production in 1953. The fiber may well do to wool what nylon did to silk...
...nylon, the revolution is still going on. Once Du Pont made most of its nylon components out of coal. But when coal (like wool) went soaring sky-high in price, Du Pont built a huge plant on Texas' Sabine River, started making the raw materials from natural gas four years ago. This week Du Pont is opening a similar plant at Victoria, Texas...