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Overview

Roger Williams (1890-1978) founded DuPont's Ammonia Department and played a key role in the top secret Manhattan Project during World War II. He began his undergraduate education at the University of Nebraska but transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), earning a bachelor's degree in chemistry there in 1914. He remained at MIT for two years of graduate study, but left in 1916 to take a position as a research chemist with the Nitrogen Products Company of Providence, Rhode Island. Two years later he joined DuPont's Research Department, then known as the Chemical Department, where he began studying nitrogen fixation processes and the synthesis of ammonia. Following DuPont's decision to engage in the commercial production of ammonia in 1924, Williams oversaw the construction and subsequent operation of the company's first ammonia synthesis plant at Belle, West Virginia, where he assembled a corps of technical experts to carry out an ongoing research program. Williams's hunch about the importance of ammonia to the growing chemical industry proved correct, and in 1931 DuPont organized a separate Ammonia Department around him and his staff at the Belle plant.

During World War II, Williams managed the Hanford Engineer Works, a massive complex in eastern Washington that produced the plutonium used in the Manhattan Project's successful atomic bomb effort. In 1945 he was promoted to Vice President, appointed to the Executive Committee and elected to DuPont's Board of Directors. As a member of DuPont's top management, Williams championed agricultural and biochemical research, and argued successfully in 1950 for a major expansion of the company's Haskell Laboratory of Toxicological and Industrial Medicine. He retired in 1967 after 50 years of service.

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