The Wizards of Wilmington

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In Augusta, Ga. this week, an invading army of engineers, builders and technicians jammed the city's hotels and spare rooms to the rafters. Across the Savannah River in South Carolina, the aluminum glint of hundreds of trailers winked among the pecan groves. Giant bulldozers ripped through slash pine and red clay, pushing a four-lane, 20-mile express highway from North Augusta to Ellenton (pop. 700), a town soon destined to disappear before the bulldozers' onrush.

The target of this invading army is just beyond Ellenton: a 200,000-acre site spotted with hundreds of hustling trucks, steam shovels and cement mixers. There the steel skeleton of a headquarters building is already rising--the focus for sightseers who come from miles around to see what the Du Ponts are doing. What E. I. du Pont de Nemours is doing is worth considerable attention. It is building the Government's $600 million plant to make the components for the hydrogen bomb. "You can't tell no lies about this thing," said an awestruck sharecropper. "This thing is bigger'n any lie."

It is growing bigger by the day. By next month, the headquarters will be ready for Du Pont's field commanders, now bossing the operation from a columned, pre-Revolutionary mansion near Ellenton. By summer their work force will reach 6,000, mounting to 35,000 at the project's peak next year. Target date for completion: late 1953.

Arms & the Men. Du Pont took the H-bomb job with the greatest reluctance. Ever since a U.S. Senate committee investigated the munitions industry in 1934, Du Pont has sought to avoid anything that might revive the "merchants of death" stigma which the committee's inquisitor, a skillful young lawyer named Alger Hiss, helped hang upon it. But the Government thought that Du Pont was the only company for the job. Said an atomic energy expert: "To ask anybody else to build the plant when you could get Du Pont would be like settling for a rookie when you could get Babe Ruth in his prime."

Du Pont is the world's greatest chemical empire, the master technician of U.S. industry. It has 72 plants in 25 states, employs about 85,000 people, turns out 1,200 different types of products, and last year chalked up $1,297,000,000 in sales. Its wizardry in its Wilmington laboratories periodically conjures up entire new industries. Duco, the first quick-drying auto finish, revolutionized U.S. auto production. Cellophane changed the packaging habits of everybody from butchers, bakers and cigarette makers to orchid growers. Nylon changed the hosiery habits of U.S. women, is helping to revolutionize the textile industry. Fully 60% of Du Pont's sales come from products which were not known or were in only limited production a quarter-century ago; the raw materials it turns out are used in everything from soap to steel.

The Revolutionists. The men who wrought this revolution were the Du Pont brothers, Pierre, Irenee and Lammot, a rare combination of technical brains, speculative instinct and superb managerial skill. They changed the 149-year-old company from a successful powder mill in Wilmington, Del., into a chemical cornucopia. In so doing, the brothers also learned that revolutions are for young men: each served his time as Du Pont president and retired by 60. Now, Pierre, 80, Irenee, 74, and Lammot, 70, leave the job of running the vast empire to others, give advice only when asked.

It is the young revolutionists in the company that the Government is counting on to build the H-bomb components, the same experts who built the $400 million Hanford plant and made the first plutonium for the Abomb. On that job, Du Pont used its know-how and skilled managerial teams to duplicate the laboratory achievements of nuclear physicists on the production line. Although Du Pont has modestly deprecated its role at Hanford, the outsiders who worked on the project give unstinting praise to the Du Pont men who made the mass production possible. Among them, none did more than Crawford Hallock Greenewalt, who now, at 48, sits in the president's chair at Du Pont. Said Lieut. General Leslie M. Groves, whose Manhattan Project had the overall responsibility for both Hanford and Oak Ridge: "There are two men without whom we could not have completed Hanford. One is "Slim" Read [Du Pont's chief engineer], the other is Greenewalt."

Fission & Factions. When Du Pont took on the A-bomb job in 1942, as reluctantly as it has taken on the H-bomb project, 39-year-old Crawford Greenewalt was the $900-a-month technical director of Du Pont's Grasselli Chemical Department. President Walter Carpenter thought that Greenewalt, a chemical engineer with a good knowledge of production, was the ideal man to act as liaison between the atomic scientists and Du Pont's production men. But when Greenewalt landed in Chicago, where the first atomic pile was being built at the University of Chicago, the scientists thought differently. They were suspicious of Greenewalt because he was not a nuclear physicist and resented Du Pont being brought into the project.

Chemist Greenewalt understood how the scientists felt; they had started the work and saw no reason why they should not keep on running it. But Production Man Greenewalt also knew that they had little conception of the complex problems --hiring, procurement, construction--in a project the size of Hanford.

Furthermore, the scientists (like plane designers and all such technical men) did not want to "freeze" designs for Hanford; they wanted to keep on improving them. But Greenewalt knew that unless the designs were frozen, there could be no mass production. At one point, relations were so strained that one of the scientists asked Eleanor Roosevelt to warn F.D.R. that Du Pont was sabotaging the project. Patiently and diplomatically, Greenewalt smoothed over the friction, boned up so well on nuclear physics that in six months he could talk to the scientists in their own language. They began calling him "Greenie," his nickname at Du Pont.

When construction started at Hanford, Greenewalt became technical director. Among the swarm of 55,000 workers, he moved into a transient camp with his wife, the former Margaretta du Pont, ate his lunches out of a box. Like everyone else, he put in an 18-hour day. Although there was no pilot plant experience to go on, Greenewalt soon became known as a man who was not afraid to make decisions, preferred to take a chance he was wrong rather than lose time in indecision.

No technical problem was too small for his concern. "Let's break this thing down to size," he would say. "Don't scatter your fire." He worked out one short cut that saved months in getting Hanford into production. When Du Pont turned the operation of Hanford over to General Electric and collected its $1-a-year fee for its work (the same fee it is getting for the H-bomb work), Greenewalt got the ultimate accolade from the atomic scientists; Enrico Fermi asked him to quit Du Pont and devote his life to pure research.

Greenewalt thought seriously about the proposition, but turned it down for a good reason. "Compared to theirs," said he, "my math is like two-plus-two." He went back to Wilmington, where the corporation was well aware of the crack job he had done. When President Carpenter, tired out from the strain of the war years, retired in 1948, Greenewalt became president.

Manager's Manager. In his wiry 5 ft. 10 in. frame, Crawford Greenewalt combines energy, charm, a chain-reacting mind, and some seeming contradictions. He has all the cold precision of a trained scientist, can concentrate so deeply that all the furniture could be removed from his office unnoticed. Just as quickly, he can become as gregarious as a traveling salesman. He can ponder a bothersome management problem for hours, but if need be put it aside with a calm: "Well, I'm not going to bleed and die over that." He can leave a day's crisis at the office door, bounce off for an untroubled swim, bridge party or stiff round of tennis.

Greenewalt does not run Du Pont alone. It is run by a system which has proved to be a model for U.S. corporate management. Like an army, it has a general staff to decide broad policies, and line officers to carry out the tactics.

The general staff is the nine-man executive committee, of which Greenewalt is chairman. After it maps out the grand strategy, the tactical job of putting it into effect is turned over to the ten industrial departments (see diagram), which often compete with each other. Each is run by its own general manager, who gets a completely free hand and high pay (reportedly as much as $230,000) but has trouble keeping his best men. Du Pont switches them about to "cross-fertilize" the company, e.g., an organic chemist may be put in charge of sales, where he is left to sink or swim. If the manager does a good job, the general staff does not meddle with him. If he does a poor one, the tough-minded staff does not meddle either; it gets another man.

Though Greenewalt is chairman of the potent executive committee, he has only one vote on it. Fluent and articulate, he must sometimes use all of his persuasiveness to win a majority to his side. Like the Supreme Court, the committee sometimes splits 5 to 4, and heated arguments develop. When they do, says one committeeman, "Crawford usually grabs the ball and starts talking. He's an excellent filibusterer." When tempers subside, Greenewalt steers the talk to some new problem, brings up the contested one later.

The committee meets every Wednesday at Du Pont's GHQ: the ninth floor of Wilmington's Du Pont Building. It meets all day, lunching with top men from the line departments and lower-echelon people who get to know the top command in this fashion. The top command also learns to know those in the lower echelons. Says Greenewalt: "I started looking for my successor the first year I was in office."

Heads on a Skimmer. Each year the company scours U.S. colleges for their ablest men, lures about 350, has gradually moved its requirements so high that Greenewalt quips: "If we had had the same system then, I couldn't have got in." Beginners' pay is low ($317 a month for a B.S., $375 for an M.S.), but advancement can be fast. Once a man breaks ahead of his average age & salary group, his name will pop up on a "skimmer chart" which Greenewalt constantly consults. That man is then moved around departments to broaden his experience. Greenewalt is a good example. In six years, he shot from $10,800 to $362,760 a year (including bonuses), last year earned $539,000 (including a $400,000 bonus). By paying bonuses to all employees who do an outstanding job, Du Pont makes sure that every man's work is reviewed once a year. Last year it paid $26.7 million in bonuses to 5,908 employees.

"Who Is the Brightest?" Greenewalt came naturally by his scientific bent. His father, Dr. Frank Greenewalt, was resident physician at Philadelphia's Girard College. His mother, the former Mary Elizabeth Hallock, was a concert pianist, and patented her own invention, the use of varicolored lighting to harmonize with the moods of music. Both parents were old friends of Wilmington's Du Ponts; Mrs. Greenewalt's sister, Ethel Hallock, had married William K. du Pont, brother of Pierre, Lammot and Irenee.

Bright but cocky, Greenewalt finished Philadelphia's William Penn Charter School among the top ten of his class. In the 1918 class yearbook was written: "Who is the brightest? Evans.* Who thinks he is? Greenewalt." Greenewalt went off to M.I.T. with no clear notion of what he wanted to be, settled on chemical engineering, but was 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 (Irenee's daughter) his childhood friend. In 1926 they were married.

Hobby Lobby. The Greenewalts live in a 15-room rambling stone hilltop house 7 1/2 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. Now, at a feeding station outside an upstairs window, he is photographing birds. On weekends, he and his wife often fly to Bermuda where they have a hideaway, "Wreck House," supposedly built by pirates. There Greenewalt likes to "goggle" (float on the water and watch fish through goggles).

The fact that Greenewalt married the boss's daughter did not hurt him at Du Pont, but he still had to make his own way. He became an expert in high-pressure synthesis, a new field which opened the door to all kinds of chemical processes, (e.g., urea, long-chain alcohols), won 18 patents, most of them used by Du Pont. It was Greenewalt's work on nylon--the biggest treasure yet turned up in Du Pont test tubes--which put him far up on the skimmer chart. Du Pont's brilliant scientist, Dr. Wallace Carothers, first materialized the nylon fiber by finding a way to simulate the long-chain molecules found naturally in silk. But it was Greenewalt's patient five-year nursing, from test tube to pilot plant, that helped bring nylon to mass production in 1939, put his feet on the road to the presidency.

Only two other men not of Du Pont blood and name have held that job since 1802, when Eleutheree Irenee du Pont founded the company.

On the Brandywine's Banks. Eleutheree Irenee du Pont de Nemours was a young Frenchman* who had studied gunpowder-making under France's great chemist Lavoisier, had become inspector general of commerce under King Louis XVI. When revolutionary mobs stormed the Tuileries in 1791, Irenee and Papa Pierre led 60 volunteers who defended the King until only they and six others were left alive. They escaped, later sailed to the U.S. There, young Irenee, 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 Mexico, and the Civil War (the Monitor fired Du Pont powder against the Merrimac). U.S. pioneers used Du Pont powder to clear the wilderness, build railroads, raise factories.

$2,100 Down. But it was still a comparatively small company when President Eugene du Pont, Founder Irenee's grandson, died in 1902--and brought on a crisis. The family considered none of the Du Ponts qualified to run the company, wanted to sell it to its biggest competitor, Laflin & Rand. But 37-year-old Alfred du Pont, a cousin to Eugene and a veteran powdermaker, persuaded the family to sell out to him and Cousins Coleman and Pierre du Pont for $12 million ($2,100 down and the rest in notes). Later, they were joined by Pierre's brothers, Irenee and Lammot, and soon profits rolled in so fast that all the notes were paid off and Du Pont bought up Laflin & Rand and a score of other rival companies. By 1912, the Du Ponts had built such a mighty "Powder Trust" that a federal court split it into three independent companies--Du Pont, Hercules and Atlas. But Du Pont, which had survived the many dangers of powdermaking,* survived the split, because at Army & Navy insistence, it was allowed to keep all of the military powder business. During World War I, Du Pont supplied 40% of all the powder used by the Allied powers, chalked up more than $1 billion in sales, expanded its plant capacity 54-fold.

Feudal Dynasty. As masters of all this power, Delaware's Du Ponts came to resemble a feudal dynasty. The whole state bore their imprint: people rode on highways built by and named for Du Ponts, stopped at a Du Pont hotel, sent their children to Du Pont-built schools. The liege lords lived in a manner befitting their station. Alfred built a palace, "Nemours," to rival Versailles. In Pennsylvania, Pierre reared his "Longwood" estate, boasting a 1,200-seat open-air theater whose curtain is a sheet of water, and one of the largest organs ever built for a private house. Up went numerous other Du Pont chateaus and villas.

Also, like many a feudal family of old, the Du Ponts quarreled among themselves. When Pierre succeeded ailing Coleman as president in 1908, Pierre and his brothers borrowed $8,500,000 from J. P. Morgan & Co., formed Christiana Securities* (named after a nearby stream)and bought Coleman's stock over Alfred's objections. Alfred lost out in a famed court fight that left Pierre, Irenee and Lammot running the company.

Merchants of Peace. Pierre and his brothers probably could not have pushed Du Pont into concentrated research and built today's huge empire without World War I's windfall. It left Du Pont--whose peak sales prewar had never exceeded $27 million--with $250 million in assets. The Du Ponts, whose sharp speculators' eyes were already on the fast-growing auto industry, had taken $49 million and bought 28% of the stock of General Motors. Later, when it looked as if G.M. was going on the rocks, Du Pont put in Pierre as president, before long had G.M. back on its course. Then the Du Ponts set to work to find peacetime uses for the tremendous expansion in the production of chemicals (sulphuric acid, nitrocellulose) which had been vital for munitions.

Soon Du Pont's peacetime business soared far above even the war years. Nitrocellulose, used for gun cotton, proved to be the source of peacetime wonders. It led to Duco to rayon and to cellophane--the latter two based on French patents. The French thought they were sticking Du Pont with a useless novelty in cellophane (the stuff came apart when wet). But Du Pont's researchers discovered how to waterproof it (a variant of Duco did the trick), and built such a market that by 1939 cellophane was one of Du Pont's biggest-selling products. Then came nylon, which eclipsed even cellophane and today still leads all Du Pont sales.

New Frontiers. The Du Pont revolution is still growing. President Greenewalt himself has been testing a new suit, made of Du Pont's newest synthetic fiber, Dacron. It looks and feels like wool, but outwears it, costs only half as much, is washable and mothproof--and is virtually wrinkleproof. Says Greenewalt: "The only way you can get the crease out is with an iron."

Du Pont is now completing a new plant at Kingston, N.C. to put Dacron into mass production in 1953. The fiber may well do to wool what nylon did to silk.

In nylon, the revolution is still going on. Once Du Pont made most of its nylon components out of coal. But when coal (like wool) went soaring sky-high in price, Du Pont built a huge plant on Texas' Sabine River, started making the raw materials from natural gas four years ago. This week Du Pont is opening a similar plant at Victoria, Texas.

Even while Du Pont expanded its nylon production, it built a $17 million plant at Camden, S.C. whose product may partially eclipse nylon itself. This fiber is Orion, a cousin of nylon but far stronger, more resistant to sunlight. The U.S. textile industry is already using it in men's summer suits and spun hose, women's dresses, auto tops and a wealth of new decorator fabrics. (But Du Pont will get stiff competition from Union Carbide's Dynel, an Orion-type fiber.)

As Du 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 at Wilmington, Du Pont is turning out titanium metal--as light as aluminum, but as strong and corrosion-resistant as stainless steel. Titanium is costly now, but Du Pont remembers that aluminum once cost $12 a pound, thinks titanium has a big future.

The Price of Pioneering. Du 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 the nylon."

Du Pont can afford the gamble, not only because it is big, but because it is efficient. Du Pont has kept its prices low. In the last decade, while consumer prices rose 75%, Du Pont's increased 35.8%. Yet it has achieved such efficiency that last year it earned about 14% ($187 million) on its $1,297,000,000 sales. (In 1951's first quarter, it boosted sales 40% and net 9% over the same 1950 quarter.) With an additional $120 million in G.M. dividends, its 1950 net profit rate reached an astounding 21%. Obviously, G.M. provides a great many of the chips which enable Du Pont to take its 20-to-1 chances on research.

Even so, Du Pont could not afford the risk if it did not keep the most rigorous control on where the research dollars go. It spends only 15% to 20% of its research budget on fundamental (i.e., "pure") research which, while unpredictable, is also productive of the biggest strikes (e.g., nylon). It concentrates most heavily on applied research -- the further development of processes already known -- which have now brought Orion out of the same test tubes where nylon was found. The greatest problem, says Greenewalt, is to be patient enough to carry a seemingly losing proposition for five or six years, but at the same time be hard-boiled enough to know when to quit. ("No scientist ever wants to.") By so doing, Du Pont is able to trim the 20-to-1 odds to final odds of 4 to 1 on the projects which are actually pushed on after others are dropped.

At any stage of Du Pont's growth, the company could have concentrated on achieving dominance in the fields it then occupied. But Du Pont has been chary of monopoly, for it knows that any monopoly gets fat and lazy, obsoletes itself in time. Thus Du Pont, though it is one of the biggest U.S. paintmakers, yields first place to Sherwin-Williams. Union Carbide outsells Du Pont in the field of plastics. American Viscose outsells it in rayon. Black gunpowder (once Du Pont's prime product) is now so obsolete that the company, which formerly operated 25 black gunpowder plants, has closed all but one. But in assets Du Pont is as big as the next three chemical companies (Union Carbide & Carbon, Allied Chemical & Dye and Dow Chemical) put together.

How Big? Has Du Pont grown too big? The U.S. Government seems to think so. Though it relies on Du Pont's size to build the plant for H-bomb components, the Government keeps trying to cut it down by antitrust suits. Since the original 1912 "powder trust" suit, the Government has brought 20 antitrust prosecutions against Du Pont. The score to date: civil cases--one conviction, one dismissal without trial, one consent decree; criminal cases--one acquittal after trial, one quashed, two nol-prossed, seven nolo contendere. Now six antitrust cases are pending.

Du Pont no longer meets such attacks with its closemouthed, publicity-shy methods of old. Greenewalt, who devotes a great deal of his time to public relations, believes in taking Du Pont's case to the public. His answer to the charge of bigness is that Du Pont has grown big because it has succeeded in providing things the U.S. consumer wants, that it will continue to grow as long as it succeeds in the market place. Says President Greenewalt: "It is the customer, and the customer alone, who casts the vote that determines how big any company should be."

Greenewalt points out that small businesses, instead of declining, have continued to multiply, with big companies such as Du Pont contributing to their growth. "Cellophane alone," he says, "has given rise to 300 smaller businesses that process it. They provide 40,000 jobs with an annual payroll of $120 million--and only 7,000 of the jobs are in the manufacture of it. Concentration, far from being unwholesome, may be desirable or even indispensable if it means that through a concentration of money, skill and management a job is done that otherwise would not be done."

Du Pont's own employees have such boundless faith in the company's abilities that when Du Pont polled them on products they would most like to see developed, they suggested everything from a tooth preservative and a salve that grows hair, to wings enabling man to fly on his own power. Du Pont's President Greene-walt thinks their imagination may have ranged a little far, but he points out that there are 90-odd chemical elements and that only a tiny fraction of their possible combinations have been put to commercial use. Says he: "The greatest discoveries are yet to come."

*Montgomery Evans II of Greenwich, Conn., who has written two books on book-collecting and travel and is looking for a publisher. * In France, the name Du Pont is nearly as common as Smith in the U.S. To identify his branch, Irenee's father, Pierre, added "Nemours," the locality where he owned a country estate. *Pierre died from exhaustion in 1817 after fighting a fire all night; Irenee's wife was permanently injured in a blast that killed 36 workmen in 1818; Lammot du Pont, father of the brothers Pierre, Lammot and Irenee, was mortally injured in 1884 while trying to "quench" some fuming nitroglycerin to avert a disaster. *Christiana, which still holds 27% of Du Pont stock, paid $200 a share for Coleman du Pont's stock. Each share of Du Pont common has since risen to a market value (counting splits) of $11,779 and has paid a total of $5,958.91 in dividends.

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