E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co was formed by Éleuthère Irénée du Pont using machinery imported from France to produce gunpowder. This was established at Eleutherian Mills near Wilmington, Delaware. By the 1860s the new company supplied almost half the gunpowder use by the Union Army during the American Civil War. Following this it would continue to expand producing dynamite and smokeless powder, and by 1902 it began to centralise its research department. It would also acquire small companies which in 1912 led to it being investigated under the Sherman Antitrust Act. This would find it to have a monopoly and led to it being forced to sell off some of its subsidiaries, creating Hercules Powder Company and Atlas Powder Company. At this time, it would also establish the first industrial research laboratories in the United States of America. During the 1920s it would continue to focus on material sciences working on polymers, neoprene, and synthetic rubber. During the Second World War it was a major producer of wartime materials and worked on the Manhattan Project. After the war it continued to produce new materials. In 2017 it merged with Dow Chemical Company to form DuPont de Nemours Inc, also known as DuPont.