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Extending Life. Its search for higher profits has led Du Pont to look with new interest on the consumer field, to which it now sells only 5% of its products directly. The company is speeding up development of consumer products, such as its recently introduced electric toothbrush, and would like to expand into the homebuilding field with plastic piping and other products. But Du Font's strength for the foreseeable future will continue to be as a wholesaler to U.S. industries of the secrets it unlocks in the laboratory.
Just what wonders Du Pont will uncork next is hard to forecast, if only because the company's compass is so wide. Du Pont's chemists—like their colleagues throughout the chemical industry—never stop asking questions: How can electricity be transmitted without causing heat, what makes plants flower when and how they do, what are some new commercial possibilities of magnetism? Along the way, the perpetual search produces so many new products and processes that Du Pont is hard-pressed to find names for all of them, has called upon a computer to assemble 153,000 possible two-and three-syllable "nonsense" words that mean nothing in English. A while ago the company gave one product a name that means enema in Swedish, but human employees discovered the computer's whimsy and the name was changed.
What the chemists foresee is more and faster technological development. The conquest of space has opened up huge new possibilities for the industry, which is already deeply involved in creating the technology that will push that conquest further. In the not very distant future, the chemists expect to produce clothes that last a lifetime, auto oil that never needs to be changed, paints that never chip or wear, fertilizer that stays potent for several years. Their labs are already at work on chemicals that enable crops to resist frost and drought, preservatives that keep food fresh for years without chilling, plastics tougher than steel, atomic automobiles, pills that prevent all infectious diseases and other pills that hold back old age by slowing the degenerative processes of the human body.
Where Ponce de Leon failed, the chemists may succeed. What they are doing is enough to give pause to the philosophers and make theologians nervous: some chemists are experimenting with compounds to change the human temperament, making the phlegmatic man more personable, and others are progressing rapidly toward discovery of the chemical bases of life as a prelude to reproducing living organisms in the test tube. Having started out to duplicate the products of raw nature, the chemists have gone nature one better. They are reversing and revising the natural processes, turning out products that have existed nowhere before except in man's fertile imagination.