The Chemist as Inventor

Abstract

At the close of the 19th century, the German synthetic dye industry was the undisputed world leader. It had become a symbol not just of Germany’s industrial prowess but also of its mastery of organic chemistry. This was recognised at home and abroad, particularly in England, where the dye industry was founded. During the 20th century there were moments of acute interest in how this had occurred, most particularly at the outbreak of World War I, when Britain found itself without a strategic dye industry— whose intermediates and processes were the sources of modern explosives and poison gas—and in the aftermath of World War II when, especially in the United States, new paradigms of technological revolutions were invoked. The latter was to be the stimulus for the classic study, John J. Beer’s The Emergence of the German Dye Industry, published in 1959.2 Beer’s volume reviewed the history of the German synthetic dye industry prior to the formation of I. G. Farbenindustrie in 1925, and though it remains the most readable introduction to the subject, it does not address many important aspects of the key relationships between chemistry and technology, and of corporate structure and innovation. Beer readily admitted an important lacuna, namely the precise nature of the connections between academic chemists and the dye firms, particularly royalties and contractual arrangements.3