COLEMAN DU PONT
Name: Thomas Coleman Du Pont
Born: 1863
Died: 1930
Capitalist and US senator, born in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. He started work in
his father's Kentucky coal mines after graduating from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and developed the Central Coal & Iron Co into a major
business. After a brief period managing a steel company, he bought a
Pennsylvania street railway company and constructed and managed street railways.
With his cousins, Alfred and Pierre du Pont, he purchased the family's Delaware-based
explosives company and assumed its presidency (1902-1915). He masterminded the
takeover of some hundred competitors and the reorganization of the business into
a huge holding company, E I du Pont de Nemours Company of New Jersey. The
company became the sole US producer of military gunpowder and the country's
dominant explosives manufacturer; in 1907 the government successfully sued du
Pont for anti-trust violations. Having sold his stake in the firm (1914), he
shifted his business interests to real estate, insurance, and hotels. He owned,
among other hotels, the McAlpin and Waldorf-Astoria in New York City and the
Willard in Washington, DC, and built the Equitable Life Building, New York, then
the city's largest office building. He sat in the US Senate (Republican,
Delaware, 1921-1928).
Name: Thomas Coleman Du Pont
Born: 1863
Died: 1930
Capitalist and US senator, born in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. He started work in
his father's Kentucky coal mines after graduating from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and developed the Central Coal & Iron Co into a major
business. After a brief period managing a steel company, he bought a
Pennsylvania street railway company and constructed and managed street railways.
With his cousins, Alfred and Pierre du Pont, he purchased the family's Delaware-based
explosives company and assumed its presidency (1902-1915). He masterminded the
takeover of some hundred competitors and the reorganization of the business into
a huge holding company, E I du Pont de Nemours Company of New Jersey. The
company became the sole US producer of military gunpowder and the country's
dominant explosives manufacturer; in 1907 the government successfully sued du
Pont for anti-trust violations. Having sold his stake in the firm (1914), he
shifted his business interests to real estate, insurance, and hotels. He owned,
among other hotels, the McAlpin and Waldorf-Astoria in New York City and the
Willard in Washington, DC, and built the Equitable Life Building, New York, then
the city's largest office building. He sat in the US Senate (Republican,
Delaware, 1921-1928).