Not Counting Chemistry: How We Misread the History of 20th-Century Science and Technology

Drawing of the enshrouded construction of the Chicago pile 1. Courtesy Argonne National Laboratory

By David Edgerton

Chemistry rarely figures in histories of 20th-century science and technology. Standard accounts manifest a remarkable consensus about what is important, one in which we all appear to know what the key sciences and technologies of the last century have been. Chemistry forms at best a very minor part in these standard stories. Instead histories of science center on particle physics, the atomic bomb, eugenics, molecular biology, and computing. Histories of technology deal mainly with automobiles, aviation, the bomb (again), space rockets, computers, and the Internet. This is something of an exaggeration, but not as much as one might think. Leaving the atomic bomb or the computer out of a course on 20th-century science raises eyebrows; ignoring chemistry barely elicits a response.

Putting chemistry back into those standard stories is not as simple as it sounds. First, it requires a new basis for the writing of histories of science and technology; second, it would force us to change many of the standard historical arguments that shape our account of an extraordinary century.

Fashion is part of the reason that chemistry is left out. Our historical picture is shaped by what was said to be important in the past as well as in the present. Today we want to know the prehistory of biotechnology; yesterday we wanted to know that of the atomic bomb. Chemistry has, by comparison, not been quite so significant in the public imagination this century.

Yet other factors are at play; histories of science often seek to find the origins of present science. The most recent chemistry that figures regularly in the courses and the textbooks of the historians is that of the late 19th century. Along with electricity, it was chemistry—specifically synthetic organic chemistry—that was central to the so-called second industrial revolution. The rise of research in the chemical industry—rather than the academy—is the center of attention for historians. And so it should be.

But the fact that this new wave of research is the last routine reference helps us understand that the standard histories of science and technology, whether old ones or the ones implicit in up-to-date courses, are not what they appear to be. They are studies of the early history of some subsequently significant sciences and technologies, of novelties when new. We are left with a problem, for we have neither a history of invention and innovation nor a history of sciences and technologies in use. A true history of invention would be a history primarily of failures, for most inventions, even patented ones, are not exploited. The technologies that are in use at any particular time will have had their origins in such a mixture of ages that one cannot sensibly distinguish old and new. The early-20th-century world, even in developed countries, used horses as well as motorcars, kerosene as well as electricity, wood as well as steel.

Putting chemistry on the agenda requires a proper history of invention and of technologies in use. On the invention side, chemistry has been an area of extraordinary productivity up to and throughout the 20th century. The relative lack of attention given to the history of industrial research means that the full scope of this inventive activity has not been fully recognized. Equally important is that we don’t have a fully rounded history of academic science, so the enormous weight of chemical research in the history of the university is not evident. To argue that the Manhattan Project inaugurated an era of “big science”—as many of those trained in the physics-oriented history of science of the recent past have done—is to ignore the huge, long-term R&D projects of the chemical industry that long predated it. Perhaps the best examples, and ones that will be revisited later in this article, are processes for hydrogenating various substances: for example, converting coal into gasoline. These projects took years of research on a very large scale, which continues to the present day.

At the level of studies of use and historical significance—which are related but not the same—chemistry has many claims to be extremely well represented. Take, for example, World War II, which is usually discussed in terms of atomic bombs and V-2 rockets; these contributions are summed up in the phrase “the physicists’ war.” As many historians from Thomas P. Hughes to, most recently, Pap A. Ndiaye have pointed out, chemistry, chemists, and chemical corporations were central to the bomb project. Yet there is much more to be said. It is not at all obvious that the atomic bomb made a positive contribution to the war; in fact the bomb became a very expensive way to destroy two Japanese cities that could easily have been destroyed by a couple more large conventional air raids. The V-2 was without question a major setback to the German war economy: its production killed more people in the manufacturing plant than its deployment as a weapon killed in the field.

A largely forgotten achievement, on the contrary, was the great coal hydrogenation works that kept Germany fighting in that war. Without various gasoline-from-coal technologies Germany could not have fought World War II as it did. For the Nazis, self-sufficiency in fuel was a key objective, with the establishment of synthetic oil production a central element of the four-year plan of 1936 and with the appointment of Hermann Göring as “fuel commissar.” I. G. Farben’s hydrogenation process was selected as the primary model, and I. G. Farben built and ran many plants, including one for the new coal-based chemical complex at Auschwitz that would be severely bombed toward the end of the war. The process involved high-pressure hydrogenation with a catalyst under conditions that could be adjusted to produce a particular product—for example, aviation gasoline. The process combined, as it were, the making of a crude and the refining of it. The process was pioneered by Friedrich Bergius, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in 1931. As ever, there were alternatives, including the Fischer-Tropsch process, which involved the hydrogenation of carbon monoxide rather than coal. By 1944 synthetic fuel production was up to 3 million tons, or 25.5 million barrels per year. But the basic processes predated World War I.