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The company's scientists win 600 to 700 patents a year and turn over all their patent rights to the company, as is standard practice throughout industry. But Du Pont encourages its scientists by letting them share in the profits of their inventiveness. Through a special bonus system, more generous than in most other companies, it yearly pays upwards of $50,000 each to several scientists, and over the years it has made millionaires of many of them.
From the company's viewpoint, the trick is not so much to invent something as to find practical uses for it. When Du Pont developed its new plastic, Surlyn, one customer cracked: "You've got the world's greatest answer. Now start looking for questions." Whenever one of its scientists does find a genie in a bottle, the company is quick to commit everything to exploit it: more scientists, plants, funds—and, importantly, more time and patience—than any other company.
Like the Daily Double. These elements have been enough to bring Du Pont many a windfall. They came together, for example, in a narrow darkroom in the industrial area of Parlin, N.J., where Physicist R. Kingsley Blake produced Du Pont's new no-negative photographic film. Blake started out by simply trying to untangle a peculiar phenomenon that he had been observing for a few months: faint positive images that unaccountably appeared on sheets of film. He was sure that the reaction was caused by any one of countless chemicals in his photo lab—but which one? Working day and night under the red darkroom lights, he dabbled with hundreds of dyes and compounds. Finally, on Dec. 7, 1961, he reached up among the rows of bottles and picked a rarely used mixture called mercaptan l-phenyl-5-mercaptotetrazole. When he swabbed the mixture on the film and then developed it, recalls Blake, "it was like going to the race track and hitting the daily double." The payoff: a major advance in photography.
Blake's chief immediately got on the phone to Wilmington and won approval for a new, expanded lab budget. Five researchers explored more than 6,000 detailed technical references before concluding that "Blake's Effect" really meant a fresh and important development: a film that directly produces a positive image, doing away with the traditional steps of making a negative and printing a positive. When the specially coated film is exposed to light, certain parts of its emulsion are broken down in a process so mysterious that scientists themselves are a bit baffled. The film can then be developed much more simply and rapidly than ordinary film through immersion in a hypo solution, which dissolves some of the exposed parts to produce a positive; on the other hand, nothing is dissolved when ordinary film is developed, and its exposed parts become black to form a negative.
The film is not yet as fast as conventional film, and Du Pont will sell it initially to industry for use in making mats and plates for printing, and for reproducing engineering drawings. But the company does not rule out the creation of a huge market among amateur photographers. Says Research Chemist Dean R. White: "If we can lick the speed problem, we will be able to treat a paper base with this emulsion and produce a direct print on paper. Then we would be competitive with Polaroid."