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Wartime experiences seeded the new nuclear specialists, and these environments gestated their post-war opportunities. The laboratories and production sites merged industrial and scientific cultures. Hybrids—neither engineers nor scientists of the pre-war pattern—were bred and nurtured there. In each country, the mix of industry and science was different, and led to distinct versions of expertise. The Anglo-Canadian project brought together scientists and engineers from universities and the National Research Council with support from Britain's largest chemical company, ICI. In the USA, Du Pont engineers shared an uneasy responsibility for developing nuclear reactors alongside scientists of the University of Chicago's Met Lab. The working contexts fostered new know-how and introduced disputes about competence and authority. The viability of the new breeds remained disputed through the war and beyond. Disputes between established disciplines—especially physics and chemical engineering—initially ceded no territory to upstart experts.

This chapter begins with an explanation of the nature and reasons for the early American legal commitment to mobility of labor and to the courts' refusal to regard workplace knowledge, whether unpatented secrets such as Du Pont's or patented inventions by employees, as the virtually inalienable attribute of the individual employee. Against the context of the antebellum legal commitment to free mobility of skilled labor and individual entrepreneurship protected by patent law, it then examines how Du Pont's business strategy and choices for managing its skilled workers reflected and adapted to the American insistence that workplace knowledge was the attribute of skilled workers, not an asset of the firm that employed them.

During the war, theoretical ideas had been translated with dizzying rapidity into immense industrial enterprises. The concentration of wartime experience at a handful of centres was crucial in nurturing the new specialists. But the drive for the new field was provided by glimmers of technological possibilities and the opportunities that they might provide to build a new discipline. The design of ‘atomic piles’, or nuclear chain-reactors, became the aspiration and focus of activity at a half-dozen national labs. In the USA, ‘nucleonics’ was promoted as a new field, while in the UK nuclear engineering received little support from administrators as a new discipline. In each country, empirical engineering science became the focus of attention, leading to hybrid scientist-engineers unlike their pre-war counterparts.

In 1952, T. Harry Williams published a book that has since become a classic in Civil War military history, and which remains in print to this day. It is titled Lincoln and His Generals, and in it Williams posits that Abraham Lincoln was, in his words, “a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.” This chapter examines Lincoln's relationship with two of his admirals: David Dixon Porter and Samuel Francis Du Pont. Such an examination yields a useful comparison. One man started off on as bad a footing with Lincoln as can be imagined, but then overcame his bad start to earn Lincoln's approbation and support. The other started out with every possible advantage, but disappointed Lincoln and eventually found himself dismissed.

This chapter focuses on two important advertising agencies—Batten Barton Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) and Benton & Bowles (B&B). BBDO approached radio as an ideal medium for building a corporate image, overseeing programs for large advertisers concerned not with product sales but with improving consumers' views of them as good corporate citizens. Their longest-running and best-known program for the Du Pont Company, Cavalcade of America—a docudrama tracing the history of American business and innovation—served the progressive goals of cultural uplift, public education, and good corporate citizenship. Meanwhile, B&B approached radio as an opportunity for innovating advertising by challenging the advertising industry conventions. B&B's most important program, Maxwell House Show Boat—which used integrated commercials—not only became a top prime time program but also increased Maxwell House coffee sales by 70 percent.

This chapter details Raskob's life as a member a new cohort of professional men and women who began applying their professional skills to the social realm. John made himself a central player in the building of Wilmington's biggest architectural masterpiece, the Hotel Du Pont and, to his great delight, the leading figure in the creation of the Playhouse, a state-of-the-art theater built directly behind the new hotel. The impact of the war on the Du Pont Company and thus, John Raskob, is also described.

This chapter describes the deal worked out by John Raskob to purchase General Motors in 1918. Raskob set up a new holding company, eventually called the Du Pont American Industries, to buy over $25 million in GM and Chevrolet stock. The DuPont Company owned the holding company. Only about $3 million in shares was bought directly and indirectly from Durant, allowing him to keep a huge interest in his companies. The rest was bought on the open market, which stabilized the market price well above $90 and took all the pressure off of Durant and his leveraged shareholding position. DuPont owned 23.83 percent of the soon to be unified GM-Chevrolet stock.

This chapter describes the making of the spin-off production, The Sambo Girl—which centers on Eva Tanguay's song, “Sambo.” Chief among the Broadway officers backing the project was George W. Lederer, who took the script of The Blonde in Black and reworked it to suit Eva's character. The play's main character was rewritten and renamed to Carlotta Dashington—an outspoken, enterprising American who finds herself in Paris—suggesting Eva's zest and vitality. The first act of the play was set in the clothing boutique of Henri Du Pont, a matrimonial agent who calculates the odds of a particular woman cheating. In addition, the song, “I Don't Care,” was featured to become Eva's platform for her innovative style.

The past couple of decades have been a confusing, frustrating period for engineers. With their creations making the world an ever richer, healthier, more comfortable place, it should have been a time of triumph and congratulation for them. Instead, it has been an era of discontent. Even as people have come to rely on technology more and more, they have liked it less. They distrust the machines that are supposedly their servants. Sometimes they fear them. And they worry about the sort of world they are leaving to their children. Engineers, too, have begun to wonder if something is wrong. It is not simply that the public doesn’t love them. They can live with that. But some of the long-term costs of technology have been higher than anyone expected: air and water pollution, hazardous wastes, the threat to the Earth’s ozone layer, the possibility of global warming. And the drumbeat of sudden technological disaster over the past twenty years is enough to give anyone pause: Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Challenger, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, the downing of a commercial airliner by a missile from the U.S.S. Vincennes. Is it time to rethink our approach to technology? Some engineers believe that it is. In one specialty after another, a few prophets have emerged who argue for doing things in a fundamentally new way. And surprisingly, although these visionaries have focused on problems and concerns unique to their own particular areas of engineering, a single underlying theme appears in their messages again and again: Engineers should pay more attention to the larger world in which their devices will function, and they should consciously take that world into account in their designs. Although this may sound like a simple, even a self-evident, bit of advice, it is actually quite a revolutionary one for engineering. Traditionally, engineers have aimed at perfecting their machines as machines. This can be seen in the traditional measures of machines: how fast they are, how much they can produce, the quality of their output, how easy they are to use, how much they cost, how long they last.

The foregoing chapters bring us to the point where we can directly address the three themes that constitute the subtitle of the book—namely place, power, and provenance. Reflecting the binary thinking that pervades the agri-food literature—global versus local, embedded versus disembedded, conventional versus alternative, quantity versus quality, and so forth— these themes tend to be treated in a highly compartimentalized fashion, with place and provenance being the preserve of the alternative food literature, while power seems to be the proper object of analysis in the conventional food literature. This binary conceptual tradition has the effect of segmenting the food sector into unduly rigid and path-dependent worlds of production. It could even lead to the (erroneous) conclusion that the conventional food chain is inextricably tied to a particular world of production, invariably the Industrial World, while alternative food chains are embedded in, and tethered to, the Interpersonal World. To overcome this unwarranted division of labour, we propose to examine the roles of place, provenance, and power in both the conventional food chain and the ecological food chain. However, we also want to suggest that the borders between these worlds are more porous and much less static than the worlds of production literature sometimes implies, leaving open the possibility that firms and regions can move from one world to another. Each world of production may have its own nuanced regulatory environment, where a specific mix of rules, regulations, and quality conventions defines its distinctive milieu, but all worlds are subject to some meta-regulatory trends that are emerging in the global food sector, two of which have the potential to induce significant changes. For the sake of simplicity, we shall refer to these meta-regulatory trends as the new moral economy on the one hand and the neo-liberal economy on the other. Taken in isolation, these regulatory trends could trigger very different trajectories of development, with major implications for place, power, and provenance in the food chain, because the former involves reregulating the food sector, while the latter aims to deregulate it.