Word: ponts
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TEFLON In 1938 Roy Plunkett, a young Du Pont chemist, was trying to find a new kind of refrigerant for manufacturers and filled a tank with a gas related to Freon. When he opened it later, he found he had accidentally created a slippery white powder. General Leslie Groves, heading the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb, heard about the substance from a Du Pont friend when his scientists were looking for a material for gaskets that could resist the bomb's corrosive gas, uranium hexafluoride. Groves had Du Pont make Teflon for the bomb, but it wasn...
...next round of innovations in networking is done in India or China. How many years is it before either Cisco relocates to India or China and grows most of its new jobs there or the next Cisco is actually created there?" That's not so farfetched, says Du Pont CEO Chad Holliday: "If the U.S. doesn't get its act together, Du Pont is going to go to the countries that do, and so are IBM and Intel. We'd much rather be here, but we have an obligation to our employees and shareholders to bring value where...
Another problem has been the tarnished image of science itself. Catchphrases that felt inspiring in the 1950s--"Better living through chemistry," "Atoms for peace"--have a darker connotation today. Du Pont, which invented nylon, became known as well for napalm. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island soured Americans on nuclear power. Shuttle crashes and a defective Hubble telescope made NASA look inept. Substances from DDT to PCBs to ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons proved more dangerous than anyone realized. Drug disasters like the thalidomide scandal made some people nervous about the unintended consequences of new drug treatments. It's in that context...
...with a firm commitment to crack the market, however long it might take. "If the Japanese get the impression that you're not committed to business for the long term, you're in trouble," says Robert J. Sievers, who just completed a three-year stint as president of Du Pont Japan. Echoes James Abegglen, director of the Graduate School of Comparative Culture at Tokyo's Sophia University: "There must be a conviction that says you are going to be in Japan, by God, whatever it takes...
...prototypes for the Ergon; for the Equa, designed in collaboration with Don Chadwick, there were 27. Before Equa, there were two kinds of office chairs: seat and back could be separate, as in Ergon, or they could be one solid shell. Stumpf and Chadwick found a new material (Du Pont's Rynite, a reinforced fiber glass) and thereby an ingenious third design: the Equa shell is continuous, but a graceful H-shaped slice is carved out of the lower back so that it becomes virtually animate, bending like two independent pieces. "One day I took an X-Acto knife...