Background
Charles was born on October 18, 1882 in Norwich, Connecticut, United States, the son of Milton Henry Stine and Mary Jane Altland Stine. His father was a Lutheran clergyman and an author and lecturer.
Charles was born on October 18, 1882 in Norwich, Connecticut, United States, the son of Milton Henry Stine and Mary Jane Altland Stine. His father was a Lutheran clergyman and an author and lecturer.
Stine attended Gettysburg College (B. A. , 1901; B. S. , 1903; M. A. , 1904; M. S. , 1905) and, while studying for the master's degrees, taught chemistry at Maryland College for Women. In 1906 he became a fellow at Johns Hopkins (Ph. D. , 1907).
In 1907 Stine went to work for E. I du Pont de Nemours and Company, becoming one of only a handful of organic chemists employed in American industry. He was first assigned to the Eastern Laboratory in New Jersey, which du Pont had organized in 1902 as its first formal research venture. Its purpose was to bring the United States abreast of European advances in high explosives.
In 1909 Stine became director of the laboratory's organic chemical work. He was responsible for a new series of much safer explosives for use in coal mines, the development of low-freezing dynamites, and the first commercial TNT made in this country. In general he developed processes for the manufacture of high explosives not commercially available in the United States until then.
In 1916 Stine went to England as head of a du Pont group that was to study British attempts to establish a dyestuffs industry independent of Germany, which had been the first country to develop industrial research laboratories and produce synthetic dyes from coal-tar derivatives. The information that the group obtained in England, together with further intensive research under Stine's direction, enabled du Pont to begin construction of its dyeworks plant at Deepwater, New Jersey, in 1917. Stine was in charge of all chemical research in the early stages of this project.
In 1917 he was transferred to the Wilmington, Delaware, office as head of the organic division of the chemical department; and from 1919 to 1921 he built up a reorganized chemical department. Indeed, Stine instituted the program of fundamental research for du Pont.
In 1927 he recruited Wallace Hume Carothers, an outstanding young research chemist at Harvard, to take charge of du Pont's research program in this area. The most spectacular result of his project was the discovery, announced by Stine in 1938, of nylon, the first synthetic fiber comparable with a natural fiber.
In 1945, after thirty-eight years with du Pont, he retired because of poor health.
He died in Wilmington, Delaware.
Stine spoke and wrote widely on popular scientific subjects. He stressed the importance of research for industry and noted the phenomenal development of the organic chemical industry in the United States during the 1920's and 1930's, a development that contributed greatly to national self-sufficiency.
On February 3, 1912, he married Martha E. Molly of Lewistown, Pennsylvania; they had two daughters.