Early Life and Family
Du Pont was born in Paris, France, son of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and Sophie Dalmas du Pont. He came to America in 1800 as an infant and grew up around the gunpowder mills founded by his father on the Brandywine Creek in Delaware. Later he attended Mount Airy College, in Germantown, Pennsylvania and then studied chemistry at Dickinson College. While there he was President of Belles Lettres Literary Society and became a friend of one of his professors, Thomas Cooper. He later became Cooper's assistant at the University of Pennsylvania. Alfred du Pont married Margaretta Elizabeth Lamott in 1824 and they had seven children.
Read more about this topic: Alfred V. Du Pont
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“I could be, I discovered, by turns stern, loving, wise, silly, youthful, aged, racial, universal, indulgent, strict, with a remarkably easy and often cunning detachment ... various ways that an adult, spurred by guilt, by annoyance, by condescension, by loneliness, deals with the prerogatives of power and love.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“Not too many years ago, a child’s experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries that parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child’s life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“—the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
and undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family with pets,
—and looked and looked our infant sight away.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)