On July 19th marked the 205th anniversary of DuPont. On July 19, 1802, in Wilmington, Del., French immigrant E.I. du Pont de Nemours founded the company that bears his name to the present day.
In 1802, the company had about 100 employees at one site in the U.S., 12 customers and one product – refined salt peter.  The earliest reported revenues were from 1804, the first year of black powder sales, at more than USD 10,000.

DuPont now has about 60,000 employees, 215 sites and a presence in more than 75 countries. With about 500,000 individual products and more than 400,000 customers, the company has grown to USD 27.4 billion in revenues.

The DuPont Oval, one of the world’s most respected and recognized corporate logos, marks the 100th anniversary of its public debut this year.

In 1906, T. Coleman du Pont, company president, sent a letter to department heads pointing out that everywhere he went in the company, he saw the company name written or printed in a different way and directed that a standard be established. That prompted Thomas Doremus, who was manager of Sporting Powder Sales, to remark that the company also had no standard trademark for ads and packaging. Doremus and Jim Skelley, Advertising Manager, were asked to “figure out a trademark”.  They went to George Wolf, a Wilmington printer and artist.  The result was the DuPont Oval, which Wolf rendered in plaster and then carved in oak.

It was initially rejected and Wolf later wrote, “After a precarious period of about a year, the trade mark was used on some advertising literature.  Then later, after considerable opposition, it was used on some labels”. There are no records of which literature or labels first brought the oval before the public’s eye in 1907, but the feedback from the field was positive.  The company’s executive committee went on to approve it and the oval was officially adopted as the DuPont trademark in May 1909.

Years later Doremus recalled that, “the oval had no particular significance, it was a design that looked good to an artist like George Wolf, just a good type of picture for advertising. As I remember, he had half a dozen designs, some square and some round, but the letters ‘du Pont’ appear better in an oval.”

Wolf’s original design had a banner through the letters that was inscribed with “Established 1802”. However elegant the banner appeared, it was impractical for some applications, especially the cut stencils used to paint the oval on wooden powder kegs and dynamite cases.  But the logo with the ribbon was still used in some printed pieces, notably on the cover of the company annual reports up to 1955, after which it was dropped altogether.

Legal protection for the trademark was not applied for until 1920 when it was registered by the United States Patent Office on July 20 as a “trademark for granular and gelatinous explosives.”  However, the oval was registered without instructions as to how it was to be drawn precisely, and variations on the geometry of the oval proliferated.  As many as 45 were recorded as late as 1948.  That year, Engineering’s Subcommittee on Drafting Room Practice selected standards proposed by G. A. Stephey.  Stephey’s formula did not result in a true ellipse, but it allowed for easy reproduction of the oval in the various sizes then in use in packaging and advertising.