Chemical Industry in the United States

Abstract

THREE hundred years ago, there was established in Boston “a strange combination of druggist's shop, metallurgist's workroom, chemist's laboratory, and alchemist's den” which may fairly claim to have given birth to the American chemical industry. It was the enterprise of John Winthrop the younger, who at the age of twenty-five years had gone from Suffolk to Massachusetts as assistant to his father, an important Puritan leader, and governor of the Company of the Massachusetts Bay. Becoming Governor of Connecticut for a time, the son later returned to England and renewed contacts with British men of science, returning afterwards to America and resuming his public service. His medicinal prescriptions became famous; he mined for lead, tin and copper; he manufactured salt, glass and iron; he produced potash, saltpetre, alum, wood pitch and tar, and indigo; he built up the first scientific library in America; and he promoted the first American chemical stock company. In celebration of the tercentenary, the American journal Chemical Industries has published a supplement entitled “Chemical Industry's Contribution to the Nation: 1635–1935”, a pleasantly presented and lavishly illustrated issue of 176 pages, which surveys the progress of chemical industry in the United States and includes a list of important commercial chemicals manufactured in that country. The chapter describing the raison d'etre and public service of the Chemical Foundation opens with the following statement: “The establishment of a self-contained synthetic organic chemical industry in the United States is the only thing of substantial value which we got out of the war. Its establishment meant more to the American people than reparations or territory. . . . The value of this industry to the American people is inestimable.”