DuPont officials and a special guest at the New York World's Fair 1939 Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library

Lammot Du Pont, the company's president (left), and C. M. A. Stine, its research director (right), show 'The Wonder World of Chemistry' to Frank Jewett, the president of Bell Labs and of the National Academy of Sciences. In this exhibit, visitors could see DuPont's machinery knitting nylon stockings; 'Miss Chemistry' modeled the finished product. In the 1920s, Stine proposed and DuPont's board encouraged a policy of funding a basic research program that was not primarily directed towards developing particular products. Although such a program might not yield immediately marketable results, they had confidence that exploratory research would pay off in the long run.