Word: ponts
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Among the Du Ponts, the business of getting to know one another is a serious affair. While more than 150 other families have married into the clan over the years, the Du Ponts like to marry among themselves, often with first cousins. That is their way of keeping the name-and the money-in the family. It also helps to maintain the unique dynasty that runs one of the world's richest family businesses, E.I. du Pont de Nemours...
Heroes & Oddballs. The patriarch of the family was Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, a French Huguenot who liked to kick around offbeat economic and political schemes with his great friend Thomas Jefferson. At least one of his notions paid off. Pierre is credited with swinging Jefferson over to the idea of making the Louisiana Purchase, which turned out to be good for business as well as the country...
...world with 117 factories employing 93,000 workers turning out 1,200 products. It has become the greatest chemical company in the world's history, a company that has spent apparently reckless millions on apparently useless laboratory research, and seen it pay off. Most of Du Pont's current products are things that never existed on land or sea until Du Pont research discovered or developed them: cellophane, nylon, Lucite and neoprene, tetraethyl (antiknock) lead for gasoline, Dacron and plastics. The latest product (not mentioned in the book) is known as Corfam, a scuff-resistant, water-repellent synthetic...
...This multiple biography by William Carr, longtime New York Post reporter, conscientiously chronicles all this progress: the Powder Trust, the antitrust suits, the intra-clan squabbles over control of the business, the rise and fall of family leaders. It also flickers upon Du Pont oddballs, heroes and politicians...
Commander Samuel Francis du Pont helped set up the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845, and during the Civil War led the task force that took Port Royal, S.C., for the North. Artillery Major Henry Algernon du Pont got the Congressional Medal of Honor for distinguished gallantry in the Shenandoah Valley. Henry du Pont (1812-89) had a thing about fences; folks used to say that he would put up a $4,000 enclosure to fence in a $2,000 pasture. And then there was "Uncle Fred" (Alfred Victor du Pont II), who in 1893 was shot to death...