Word: wilmington
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...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 $6,740 with his father's help to buy a 95-acre farm on Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, built Du Pont's first gunpowder mills. From President Thomas Jefferson, who had known the family in France, came the first order for the U.S. Army. Du Pont powder hurled the Navy's shells against the Barbary pirates in 1805, was used in the War of 1812, the War against...
...better known for his eye for pretty girls than for his scholarship. With a B.S. from M.I.T. Greenewalt got a $120-a-month chemist's job at Du Pont, but was still aimless about his future. While watching vats on a graveyard shift at the old Wilmington research lab, he passed the time by practicing the clarinet, spent his off hours courting Margaretta du Pont (Irénée's daughter) his childhood friend. In 1926 they were married...
Hobby Lobby. The Greenewalts live in a 15-room rambling stone hilltop house 7½ miles outside Wilmington with their children, Nancy, 22, David, 20, Crawford Jr., 13. Greenewalt, who used to play clarinet, cello and the piano, now likes to tootle on the basset horn. His restless mind ranges rapidly from hobby to hobby. To make model steam and gasoline engines he transformed one big downstairs room into a machine shop. He also grows orchids. To show the entire process of blooming, he once rigged up an electrically-controlled movie camera to photograph plants at 15-minute intervals...
...Pont seeks the new frontiers, there is no limit to the legerdemain which its Wilmington wizards are constantly performing. In three years they have popped out everything from a sulphur-coated grass seed which grows greener grass, to a chemical called Erifron, which makes cotton and rayon flame resistant. They have also produced a revolutionary new insulating material called Teflon. Out of Greenewalt's old specialty, high-pressure synthesis, came some long-chain alcohols which long seemed useless, but have now made Du Pont a prime supplier of raw materials for soapless soaps (detergents). In a pilot plant...
...Pont is convinced that it can stay healthy and keep growing only by plowing tremendous sums into research, thus obtain enough new products to spark its sales as old markets decline. It spent $38 million on research last year, will dedicate a new $30 million research center at Wilmington next month. "It took us ten years and $27 million to bring nylon to the production stage," says Greenewalt. "But for every nylon that hits the jackpot, there are 20 other gambles that fail to pay off. If we could not afford to carry the 19 failures, we would probably miss...