du Pont, (Thomas) Coleman (1863-1930)

US capitalist and senator. Initially, his business interests included his father's Kentucky coal mines and a Pennsylvania street railway company. Then he moved into real estate, insurance, and hotels. He owned the McAlpin and Waldorf-Astoria hotels in New York City and the Willard in Washington, DC. He sat in the US Senate as a Republican for Delaware.

He was born in Louisville, Kentucky and he started work in his father's mines after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He developed Central Coal & Iron Company into a major business. With his cousins, Alfred and Pierre du Pont, he purchased the family's Delaware-based explosives company and assumed its presidency. He masterminded the takeover of some one hundred competitors and the reorganization of the business into a huge holding company, E I du Pont de Nemours Company of New Jersey. The company became the sole US producer of military gunpowder and the country's dominant explosives manufacturer. In 1907 the government successfully sued du Pont for antitrust violations. As well as the hotels he owned, he built the Equitable Life Building in New York, at the time, the city's largest office building.