Billion-Dollar Baby

For the 110,000 stockholders, Du Pont's lean, able President Crawford H. Greenewalt last week totted up the score on a year of "transition from a sellers' to a buyers' market." His cheerful finding: "No serious dislocation or detriment to the company's business . . ."

This seemed like deep understatement. In 1949, for the first time, Du Pont's sales had crossed the billion-dollar mark to $1,025 million, a gain of 6% over the previous year. What was more remarkable, Du Pont's profits had jumped 20%. With dividends from Du Pont-controlled General Motors, the company's total net soared to $213.6 million, a 35% gain.

For his part in this, 47-year-old President Greenewalt, who came to Du Pont as a promising young chemist and later married Irenee du Pont's daughter, was well rewarded. To his $138,000 salary, the directors added a bonus of $224,760 and 1,254 shares of Du Pont common stock.

Test-Tube Triumphs. Chemist Greenewalt was well aware that Du Pont's continued growth depended on "aggressive research and . . . the development of new products." It was neglecting neither: on research, it had laid out $33 million in 1949, turned up an impressive array of promising new products. Among them:

P: Teflon, an insulator which will permit electric motors to be reduced in size without reducing the power.

P: Armalon, a tough new plastic for upholstering trucks, buses, sponge rubber furniture. In tests, the springs beneath it wore out before the coating cracked.

P: Alathon, a coating which makes paper cups, bags, .packages, etc. waterproof and resistant to heat, oils and chemicals.

P: Erifon, a solution which makes cotton and rayon fabrics fire-resistant.

Corncob Nylon. With its prize plastic, nylon, Du Pont had been experimenting at a Niagara Falls pilot plant. Object: to make one of nylon's basic ingredients (adipontrile) from a chemical (furfural) obtained from corncobs and oat hulls. This had proved so successful that capacity will be doubled this year, to produce enough adipontrile to use up 200,000 lbs. of corncobs yearly.

Du Pont, which attributes some 60% of its 1949 business to the development of new products, has many other big projects for 1950. By year's end, its huge new $30 million Experimental Station near Wilmington, Del., headquarters for the bulk of Du Pont research, will be finished. By summer, a new plant at Camden, S.C. will be ready to start spinning 6,000,000 lbs. a year of Du Pont's new synthetic fiber, Orion, on which it has spent $22 million for research and plants

(TIME, Dec. 13, 1948). Du Pont sees a big future for Orlon in auto tops, tents, etc. Still looking for new products to research, Du Pont recently polled its own employees. Some of the things they would like: a tarnish-proof coating for silverware, a chip-proof nail polish, runproof and snagproof stockings, a way to predetermine the sex of babies.

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