The DuPonts

By Robert O'Neal. A 6-part series on how DuPont started, why it did what it did, and where it stands now.

The companion to Forever in the Ground: the story of the company behind Teflon.

Part 1 of 6: Freedom, Peace and Gunpowder

The founder of DuPont was born in Paris in 1771. His name was Éleuthère Irénée du Pont. Éleuthère means freedom. Irénée means peace. He would spend his life making gunpowder.

His father, Pierre Samuel du Pont, was an economist who advised the King of France. He was friends with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

As a teenager E.I. went to work under Antoine Lavoisier, one of the greatest chemists who ever lived. Lavoisier ran France's gunpowder works. That's where E.I. learned the trade.

Then the French Revolution came. Lavoisier was executed. E.I. and his father ran a print shop that put out political papers. In 1797 it was raided and both of them were jailed for a short time. France was no longer safe for the du Ponts.

On January 1, 1800, the family landed at Newport, Rhode Island. The story goes that E.I. went hunting and his gun misfired. American gunpowder was poor and expensive. He knew how to make better.

He raised money from investors back in France. In 1802 he bought land on the Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware and built powder mills. The first DuPont powder went on sale in 1804. His father's friend Jefferson was now president, and the government became an early customer.

It was deadly work. In 1818 one explosion killed 34 people. Between 1802 and 1921 there were 288 explosions on the Brandywine, and 228 people died.

E.I. built his home right next to the mills. Many historians say it was to show workers the family shared the risk. His workers were mostly Irish immigrants. The family gave them housing and a school for their kids.

Money was always tight. The company was deep in debt most of his life. He died in 1834 and his sons took over. The company grew by supplying the War of 1812, then coal mines and railroads.

In 1850 his son Henry du Pont took charge and ran DuPont until he died in 1889. Henry had gone to West Point and served in the Army. People called him "the General." He was a hard, old-fashioned boss who wrote thousands of letters by hand and wanted every decision to go through him.

When the Civil War came, Delaware was a slave state that stayed in the Union. Henry was a strong Union man. In 1861 the governor made him a major general over the state's troops, and he is credited with helping keep Delaware loyal. DuPont would not sell powder to the Confederacy and became the biggest powder supplier to the Union Army.

His nephew Lammot was the one with new ideas. He came up with a cheaper blasting powder and pushed the company into dynamite. Henry went along, but not happily. In 1884 Lammot was killed in an explosion at a dynamite plant.

Why they did it: E.I. had a skill, a country that needed it, and a government ready to buy. From the start, DuPont's biggest customer was war, and its product was dangerous to the people who made it. Both of those things show up again later in this story.

After the Civil War the government sold off its leftover powder, and prices fell. Henry's answer to that is the next part of this story.

Part 2 of 6: Cousins, a trust and a world war

In 1872 Henry du Pont and his nephew Lammot brought DuPont and other powder makers together to set prices and split up the market. It was called the Gunpowder Trade Association. People called it the Powder Trust. DuPont used its Civil War profits to buy control of its rivals.

In January 1902 DuPont's president, Eugene du Pont, died. The older partners decided to sell the whole company to a rival, Laflin & Rand.

Alfred I. du Pont, who had worked in the powder yards since he was young, said no. He brought in two cousins, Coleman and Pierre. They paid $12 million, almost all of it in IOUs and stock. When they looked at the books, the company was worth about $24 million.

Coleman was the dealmaker. As president he bought Laflin & Rand and other rivals until DuPont and the companies it controlled made most of the gunpowder and dynamite in the country.

Alfred was the mill man, and the workers liked him. The family turned on him after he divorced and married a cousin. In 1911 his cousins took away his duties. In 1915 Pierre bought Coleman's shares out from under him. Alfred sued, lost, and moved to Florida.

Pierre was the numbers man, a chemist who brought modern accounting to the company.

In 1907 the federal government sued under antitrust law. In 1911 a federal court ruled DuPont was running an illegal monopoly. In 1912 it had to split off part of its business into two new companies, Hercules Powder and Atlas Powder. The du Pont family kept a big stake in both. Critics said the breakup was more for show than for real.

Then World War I came, with Pierre in charge. DuPont made about 40 percent of the powder the Allies used. Its sales of powder and explosives went from $25 million in 1914 to $319 million in 1918.

When the war ended, who would buy all that powder? Their answer was to use the war money to get into paints, plastics, dyes, artificial fibers and chemicals. They also bought a big piece of General Motors, and Pierre later ran GM himself.

In the 1930s a Senate committee led by Gerald Nye held hearings on companies that got rich off the war. DuPont was one of the main targets. Critics called them "merchants of death." The committee did not prove the arms makers caused the war, but the name stuck to DuPont for years.

Why they did it: control the market, keep the business in the family, and when the wars ended, find something else to sell. Chemistry was the way to keep growing.

Part 3 of 6: Nylon and Teflon

In the late 1920s DuPont set aside money for pure research. It hired a Harvard chemist named Wallace Carothers. His lab came up with neoprene, a synthetic rubber, and then nylon.

Nylon stockings went on sale across the country on May 15, 1940. Most stores sold out by noon.

DuPont's slogan at the time was "Better Things for Better Living... Through Chemistry."

In 1938 a young DuPont chemist named Roy Plunkett was working on refrigerator gas at a lab in New Jersey. He opened a tank and nothing came out. He cut it open and found a slick white solid inside. That was Teflon.

Teflon was not used in the atomic bomb itself. It was used in the plants that made fuel for the bomb.

At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the government enriched uranium using a gas called uranium hexafluoride. That gas eats through most metals, rubber and plastics. Teflon was one of the few things that could stand up to it, so it was used for the seals, gaskets, valves and pipe coatings in that plant. The uranium made there went into the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Teflon was a wartime secret until after the war. Then it went into cookware and much more.

Teflon belongs to the family of PFAS chemicals, the "forever chemicals" this site talks about. They don't break down in nature.

Part 4 of 6: What they knew

To make Teflon, DuPont used a chemical called PFOA, also called C8. Starting in 1951 it used C8 at its Washington Works plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia.

Here is what came out later in court records:

• In 1961, company scientists linked C8 to enlarged organs in lab rats.
• By the 1970s, DuPont knew C8 was building up in its workers' blood.
• In 1981, after a study found birth defects in rats, DuPont moved women off the Teflon line. Two of seven babies born to pregnant workers had birth defects.
• In 1984, DuPont found C8 in the drinking water near the plant. The public was not told.
• Waste went into pits and landfills, and C8 was discharged into the Ohio River.

In 2005 DuPont agreed to pay the EPA $16.5 million for failing to report what it knew about C8. At the time it was the largest penalty of its kind. DuPont did not admit liability.

Why they kept going: Teflon was a big money maker. Keeping it quiet protected the product.

Part 5 of 6: A farmer in West Virginia

This part hits home.

In the 1980s the Tennant family sold DuPont some land near Parkersburg. DuPont said it would be a landfill for nothing hazardous. A creek ran from that landfill into the pasture where Wilbur Tennant's cattle drank.

In the 1990s foam showed up in the creek. His cows got sick and died. He filmed it himself.

Nobody local would take his case. In 1998 he reached a lawyer named Rob Bilott. Bilott usually worked for chemical companies, not against them. That lawsuit opened DuPont's files.

The Tennant case settled in 2001. What came out led to a class action for people whose drinking water had C8 in it. In 2004 DuPont paid $70 million and put in water filters. Part of that money paid for a health study of nearly 70,000 people.

In 2011 and 2012 a science panel found probable links between C8 and six diseases: kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure in pregnancy.

Wilbur Tennant did not live to see all of it. One farmer asking questions about his animals started it.

Part 6 of 6: Where things stand now

In 2015 DuPont spun off its Teflon and chemicals business into a new company called Chemours. A lot of the PFAS liability went with it. Chemours later sued DuPont, saying DuPont badly underestimated what those liabilities would cost.

In 2017 DuPont and Chemours split a $671 million settlement of about 3,500 C8 lawsuits.

In 2009 DuPont started moving from C8 to a replacement called GenX at its Fayetteville Works plant in North Carolina. In 2017 newspapers reported GenX in the Cape Fear River. A company official later said employees had known it was reaching the river since about 1980. That plant is now run by Chemours.

In 2019 DuPont merged with Dow and then split into three: Dow, Corteva, and today's DuPont. The original company now sits inside Corteva, the seed and farm chemical company.

In 2023 DuPont, Chemours and Corteva agreed to pay $1.185 billion to public water systems over PFAS.

In July 2026 the New York Attorney General sued DuPont and others, saying they knowingly sold PFAS despite knowing the risks.

The companies have settled without admitting fault, and they say they act responsibly. That's their side.

DuPont today is a smaller company. It spun off its electronics business as Qnity in 2025 and sold Kevlar and Nomex in 2026. It makes water treatment, healthcare and building products.

The chemicals they made are still in our water, our soil, and our blood.