Private enterprise and the expansion of the chemical space, 1870-1939. A framework for comparative analysis

Discussions of the history of modern chemistry from the perspective of the expansion of chemical knowledge, or the “chemical space” resulting from exponential increases in the number of known chemical processes and substances [1], are necessarily based on the assumption that the chemical space is primarily if not wholly a public space.

Necessarily, because quantitative analyses of this kind are based on evidence from publications, primarily journal articles but also including patents [2]. Yet patents raise the complicating issue of private enterprise, because since the late 19th century most patents have come either from industrial-academic collaboration, or increasingly from wholly private in-house research, as a key part of the social system of chemistry [3]. The questions thus arise: what is the role of private enterprise in expanding the chemical space, how has that role changed over time, and how can one analyze a potentially hidden, private dimension of the resulting space? To open a possible pathway toward general answers to these questions, this paper will develop a framework for comparative analysis based on the German chemical industry and its symbiosis with academic chemists in the years 1870-1939 – arguably the most chemically productive interaction of the era – with briefer consideration of competing national industries and their interactions with academic scientists, particularly in Britain and the United States. In its conclusion, the paper will argue for the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in historical analysis, incorporating both quantitative and archival-documentary evidence [4], but will also consider the limitations of such analysis, in view of the unstable character of industrial archives.

1 Jürgen Jost and Guillermo Restrepo, The Evolution of Chemical Knowledge: A Formal Setting for its Analysis (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2022), pp. 17-18.

2 Jost and Restrepo, Evolution, pp. 3-4, 74-75; here non-public sources are admitted for knowledge about failed reactions.

3 Jost and Restrepo, Evolution, pp. 28-29, 37, 50.

4 Cf. Jost and Restrepo, Evolution, p. 77, noting the archives of BASF and Bayer as key sources.