My account of Du Pont is based on the company archives at the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware, and the secondary literature discussed below. I am grateful for the assistance of the Hagley archivists and for permission to quote and refer to letters and other documents archived there. Anyone who studies Du Pont benefits from the wealth of scholarly writing on the company. The history of Du Pont research and development in the twentieth century is told in David A. Hounshell and John K. Smith Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R & D, 1902–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). David A. Hounshell, “Interpreting the History of Industrial Research and Development: The Case of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.,” 134 Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 387 (1990), is a fascinating essay on the writing of this leading work. A leading work of business history is Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and Stephen Salsbury, Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). A very sympathetic, even romantic, telling of the nineteenthcentury history of the Du Pont Company for a popular audience is William S. Dutton, Du Pont: One Hundred and Forty Years (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1942). The family is the subject of William H. A. Carr, The du Ponts of Delaware (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964). Many of the histories of the family and the company in the nineteenth century rely on an understandably sympathetic book by B. G. du Pont, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company: A History, 1802–1902 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), as well as on the vast quantity of notes and documents she assembled in preparing the history; her notes are preserved intact at the Hagley Museum and Library. A far less sympathetic discussion of Du Pont in the twentieth century is Gerard Colby, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974).
The company manuscript collections on the nineteenth century that were of particular relevance to this project include Accession 1471; Accession 146 (the Eleuthera [Bradford] du Pont Collection), Boxes 2, 3; and the Longwood Manuscripts, Group 5, Series A and C. The collections on the early twentieth century include Accession 1305, Boxes 679, 680, 771, 772, 773; Accession 518, Box 1004; and Accession 228, Series H, Box 40.
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