Taming the Microworld: DuPont and the Interwar Rise of Fundamental Industrial Research

Abstract

This paper revisits the history of DuPont's fundamental research program during the interwar period. This program epitomized the new relationship between science and industry that unfolded in this period. Historians have largely portrayed this program as the emergence of university-style research in corporate environments, resulting in radical innovations like nylon and the transistor. Although at the corporate level fundamental research was conflated with pure science and radical innovation, a close examination of the colloid chemistry and physics groups, which have not undergone historians' scrutiny, reveals a different picture. A feeling of symbiosis between scientific and industrial or technological rationales was achieved through a deliberate strategy of materials improvement grounded in the exploration of their microscopic components. I call this process the "taming of the microworld."