This is the third profile in The Brand That…, a series about American brands that taught the country a habit, became the word for the thing itself, and outlived the world that made them. We tell their stories plainly and with respect — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
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A young Frenchman went hunting in the woods near Wilmington in 1800 and came home angry about his gunpowder. It fouled. It misfired. It cost too much and did too little. 
Éleuthère Irénée du Pont had been trained in the royal powder works in France, under the great chemist Lavoisier, and he knew the difference between powder made by guesswork and powder made by measurement. The young republic was buying the first kind. He decided to sell it the second.
He had come over in 1800, ahead of the guillotine, with his father and not much else. In 1801 he bought a worn cotton-mill site on the Brandywine Creek from a man named Jacob Broom — ninety-five acres, a dam, a millrace — for $6,740. The creek would turn the wheels. The willows along its banks would burn down to the fine charcoal that powder needs. Sulfur and saltpeter came up the Delaware by boat. He laid the buildings out with three stone walls and one wall of light wood facing the water, so that when a mill let go, it would throw itself out over the creek and spare the rest.
He had seen what powder does.
He built for the day it would happen.
It happened. In 1818 a blast tore through the yard and killed dozens. Du Pont pensioned the widows and the orphans and carried the debt for it the rest of his life. He built his own house on the hill above the mills, in range of his own powder, and his family lived there. A man who shares the danger is a man the workers will follow down to the water. By the time he died in 1834, the powder was good and the name was known.
The Rise
Powder built the company, and war fed it. Du Pont powder went into the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the gold fields, the railroad cuts. By the Civil War the firm on the Brandywine was the largest maker of black powder in the country, and it supplied somewhere between a third and a half of all the powder the Union Army burned. The family stayed in charge, son after son, eight presidents deep.
The turn from powder to chemistry came in 1902, when three young cousins — Coleman, Pierre, and Alfred du Pont — bought the old company rather than let it be sold off, and pointed it at the future. They built laboratories. They decided, against the custom of the age, that a company could pay men to ask questions with no product in sight and trust that products would come.
They came. In 1928 DuPont opened a research station across the creek and hired a quiet, brilliant organic chemist named Wallace Carothers to run the fundamental work. Out of his lab came neoprene, the first good synthetic rubber, in 1930. Then came the thing that changed the century. On a winter day in 1935 his team drew a strong, fine thread from a beaker of polymer, and DuPont had nylon — the first wholly synthetic fiber, made from coal, air, and water. The company announced it in 1938 and sold the first stockings in 1939. They sold out in three hours. When the war ended and the stockings came back to the shelves, women lined up by the thousands and fought in the aisles for them, and the papers called it the nylon riots.
It did not stop. Teflon came out of a frozen gas cylinder in 1938, when a chemist named Roy Plunkett sawed open a tank that would not empty and found a slick white powder inside. Kevlar came in 1965, when Stephanie Kwolek spun a cloudy solution most chemists would have thrown away and pulled out a fiber five times stronger than steel by weight. For half a century the name DuPont meant the chemical future itself — the slogan said it plainly, “Better Things for Better Living… Through Chemistry” — and the country believed it. When a man walked on the moon in 1969 he walked in a suit layered out of DuPont materials. The brand had taught America a habit deeper than any single product: to trust that the laboratory could improve on nature, and to want the improvement.
The Turn
The original mills had already gone quiet. Black powder gave way to smokeless, and in 1921 the company closed the Brandywine yard where it all began and let the buildings stand empty above the creek. The powder was finished. The chemistry was just beginning, and for sixty years it carried everything.
But the man at the center of the miracle never saw what it became. Wallace Carothers carried a depression no success could lift. In 1937, weeks after the nylon patent was filed and before the world had a word for what he had made, he took his own life in a Philadelphia hotel. He was forty-one. The fiber that would clothe a century was still a secret in a company file.
The Reckoning
The same gift for chemistry that made the company carried a cost the country is still counting. To make Teflon slick, DuPont used a chemical called C8, or PFOA, at its Washington Works plant on the Ohio River at Parkersburg, West Virginia. The company’s own records, going back decades, documented that the chemical did not break down, that it built up in the blood, and that it was reaching the water and the people around the plant. The records stayed in the files.
The water carried it out. Cattle on a downstream farm sickened and died. People in the valley turned up with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, at rates that did not look like chance.
A lawyer named Robert Bilott took the farmer’s case in the late 1990s and spent more than twenty years pulling the truth out of the company’s own paper. The chemical that made the non-stick pan turned out to be a forever chemical — it does not leave the water, the soil, or the body, and a version of it is now in the blood of very nearly every person alive.
In 2017 DuPont and its spun-off chemical arm settled thousands of personal-injury claims for about $670 million. In 2023 the successor companies agreed to pay $1.18 billion to clean it out of American drinking water.
In 2025 New Jersey alone settled for up to $2 billion, the largest such settlement in the state’s history, with the payments starting in 2026. The reckoning is not history. It is a bill still coming due.
What Endures
There is no longer one DuPont. In 2015 the company spun off its hardest chemistry, and its hardest liability, into a separate firm called Chemours. In 2017 it merged with Dow into the largest chemical company on earth, and then, almost at once, broke the combined giant into three — Dow, Corteva, and a new, smaller DuPont. In 2025 that DuPont spun off its electronics business too.
The lineage that began with one man and one creek is now scattered across a constellation of companies, each carrying a piece of the inheritance, the inventions and the obligations both. The old powder mills still stand on the Brandywine, kept now as a museum, the water still running past the open wall built to let an explosion out.
The town that grew up around those mills — Wilmington, the company city DuPont built and bound to itself for two hundred years — has its own side of this story, told in a companion Critical Skills series in the article The City That Chemicaled America.
What lasted was never a product. The powder went obsolete. The stockings, the pan, the bright slogan all had their season. What lasted was the method — the willingness to pay for questions, to run the laboratory ahead of the market, to make the thing that did not exist yet.
That method gave the country nylon and Kevlar and a walk on the moon, and it gave the country C8 in its blood, and both came out of the same beaker on the same creek. DuPont turned powder into chemistry, and chemistry into the texture of modern life, and it is impossible to hold the gift without also holding the cost. The willow charcoal, the thread drawn from the beaker, the slick pan, the poisoned well — they are one story, and it runs in one river.
DuPont’s whole history, the invention and the consequence alike, deserves to be remembered.
Why DuPont? Because for two centuries it was the company that made the future out of a laboratory — nylon, Teflon, Kevlar, the suit that walked on the moon — and became the very word for American chemical progress; and because the same method that engineered that progress engineered a harm the country is still paying for, which is exactly why the whole of it must be remembered.