Globalising Synthetic Nitrogen: The Interwar Inauguration of a New Industry.

The most spectacular development in industrial chemistry during the early twentieth century concerned the capture of atmospheric nitrogen by the Haber-Bosch high-pressure ammonia process at the German chemical enterprise Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik (BASF), of Ludwigshafen. This firm, confident that its complex process could not be readily imitated, set out to dominate the global nitrogen fertiliser market. The response was the emergence of rival high-pressure ammonia processes in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan during the 1920s.

The emerging role of titrimetry in late nineteenth-century industrial problem solving: the example of trace analysis for perchlorate in Chile saltpetre.

Trace analysis is usually associated with high-sensitivity analysis instrumentation. It became fully established from the 1960s following consensus among different groups of practitioners over protocols, reference materials, sensitivity, and accuracy and precision. As a consequence, wet chemical methods have been relegated to a secondary role, contrasting with their tremendous historical significance in detecting, identifying, and estimating small amounts of material.

Detecting chlorinated hydrocarbon residues: Rachel Carson's villains.

In 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring drew the public's attention to the deleterious effects of chlorinated hydrocarbons employed as economic poisons in agriculture. However, she did not discuss how their residues could be routinely identified and quantified. In part, this was because the introduction of instruments for use in environmental analysis had only just begun, and she was probably unaware of their existence.

Models for biological research: the theory and practice of Paul Ehrlich.

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the study of the living world placed considerable reliance on applied chemistry and chemical concepts. Paul Ehrlich, the subject of this paper, adopted from the mid-1870s principles of organic chemistry to devise procedures for use in histology, to suggest features of cellular structure, and to draw up cartoons that explained the nature of immunity. From a distinctly molecular basis, he devised meaningful experimental strategies and was inspired to develop speculative but effective theoretical models along the same lines that chemists had used to resolve problems of molecular structure and behavior.

Contaminated earth and water: a legacy of the synthetic dyestuffs industry.

This paper demonstrates that the subject of the transport and fate of waste from the synthetic dye industry in far more than a footnote in history. It is actually a major chapter, encompassing both Europe and the United States. Indeed, in the 1990s there was as much interest in the history of the industry and its wastes among environmental litigators, particularly in the United States, as there was in the history of the dye industry among historians of chemistry.