ambix, Vol. 58 No.

3, November, 2011, 238–56

The Fall and Rise of the History of

Recent Chemistry
Peter J T Morris
Science Museum, London, UK

This paper defines the history of recent chemistry, and then charts the
disappearance of the history of recent chemistry (“how we got here” history)
from general histories of chemistry by the late 1930s. It is also shown how
the history of recent chemistry in the early decades of the twentieth century
was very much the history of physical chemistry. The revival of the history
of recent chemistry is attributed to Eduard Farber and Aaron Ihde. Several
attempts have been made since the early 1980s to promote the history of
recent chemistry, with mixed results. The current situation is assessed, and
the paper concludes with a proposal for the entrenchment of the subject.

What is the history of recent chemistry?

Before we can discuss the historiography of recent chemistry, we have to define what
we mean by this term. In practice, there is no generally accepted definition. It is often
assumed to be the history of twentieth-century chemistry, although the seemingly
related term “modern chemistry” is often used to mean chemistry since the Chemical
Revolution. But even the more limited definition seems extravagant now that we are
in the second decade of the twenty-first century and, crucially for this paper, it cannot
be applied to any historical work produced before 1960. I propose to define “recent
chemistry” as chemistry from the present day to sixty years earlier. I have chosen
sixty years rather than fifty or seventy for two reasons. Pragmatically, it takes the
present-day subject back to around 1950, when the so-called Instrumental Revolution
began, and it conventionally represents a span of three generations, what is sometimes
called “within living memory.” I also propose that we should speak of the history
of recent chemistry when referring to the history of chemistry over the previous
sixty years rather than the history of modern chemistry. An alternative would be
the history of contemporary chemistry, but that would be even more likely to be
understood to be about the history of chemistry today and thus not referring to the
parallel activity in the past that I wish to analyse here.1
1
I wish to thank Leo Slater for pointing out that the “history of modern chemistry” was an unsuitable term for
this subject area in a personal communication dated 5 July 2011. The adoption of the term “history of recent
chemistry” is the result of this communication and an exchange of emails between the author and Ernst Homburg.

© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2011 DOI 10.1179/174582311X13129418298983
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 239

In this paper I will examine the historical study of recent chemistry in four periods
related to the history of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
(SHAC). The first is the late nineteenth century, when the history of chemistry as we
know it today first began and when the founders of SHAC were first encountering
the subject. The second period is the 1930s, when SHAC was founded, the third is
around 1965–1975, when the history of chemistry (and SHAC’s membership) was
largely professionalised and Ambix began to cover chemistry after 1800, and the
fourth period is the first decade of the twenty-first century. I have concentrated on
the English literature and works that have been translated into English. In doing so,
I have no intention of downplaying the importance of the history of recent chemistry
in other languages. Indeed, it could be argued that the history of recent chemistry has
been stronger in other countries, especially Japan. I should also make it clear that
I am concerned solely with the history of chemistry in this paper; the history of
the chemical industry, which more often covers recent developments in that field, is
another area altogether and subject to a quite different set of dynamics.2

How we got here

How was the history of recent chemistry treated before the 1930s? The 1870s was a
period when the Chemical Revolution and its aftermath passed completely out of
living memory and entered the historical past. Heinrich Link, who had taught the
phlogiston theory at Rostock in 1792, died in 1851, and Thomas Thomson, who had
heard Joseph Black lecture on chemistry in 1796, passed away in the following year.
Chemists began to feel the need to record what had happened since that watershed
in the history of chemistry but also to embrace chemistry’s distant alchemical past
rather than reject it as the chemical reformers had done. It is striking to recall that
when Hermann Kopp published his Die Entwickelung der Chemie in der neueren
Zeit3 in 1873 he was as distant in time from Lavioiser’s Traité as we are today from
Sidgwick’s Electronic Theory of Valency. The history of chemistry written by chem-
ists invariably went up to the present unless they were self-consciously placing their
work in the remote past or dealing specifically with the Chemical Revolution. These
chemists were performing the duty of the elder generation of any profession to show
its younger members “how we got here” — how their profession developed to its
current state. Not to go up to the present would have struck these chemist-historians
as absurd. Looking beyond their chemical audience to the academic establishment,
the authors conversely had to emphasise that the roots of modern chemistry lay
in the classical world, as the European academic intelligentsia, largely trained in
the classics, held history and philology to be the foremost academic disciplines
(Leitwissenschaften).4 It might seem surprising to modern eyes that Kopp began his
survey of the history of recent chemistry with the Classical World, and Aristotle in

2
Peter J. T. Morris, “A Personal Historiography of the Chemical Industry Since 1956,” Bulletin for the History
of Chemistry 32 (2007): 10–20, analyses the historiography of the chemical industry, including several works
that fall within the sixty-year cut-off used in this paper.
3
Hermann Kopp, Die Entwickelung [sic] der Chemie in der neueren Zeit (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1873).
4
I wish to thank Christoph Meinel for making this point to me in a personal communication dated 5 August
2011.
240 PETER J T MORRIS

particular. But this was in keeping with his desire to show that chemistry was worthy
of serious intellectual consideration as well as his interest in atomic theory. After
surveys of inorganic and organic chemistry up to 1840, the final section of his book
is about molecular structure, ending in 1858, some fifteen years before he was writing.
But most chemists in this period continued their accounts up to the time of publica-
tion. To take a somewhat later example, Edward Thorpe’s two-volume history of
chemistry formally stopped at 1910 in the first edition of 1910 and at 1921 in the
second edition eleven years later.5
One perennial problem with going up to the present is the need to pass judgement
in some form on living chemists, a daunting prospect, especially for a fellow chemist.
In his history of chemistry “to the present day,”6 published in 1881 and translated
into English three years later, Ernst von Meyer was not afraid to adjudge the con-
tributions made by individual chemists and to give credit where he felt it was due,
for example to Frankland in the field of valency just over three decades earlier.
However, the more recent period, roughly from the 1860s onwards, is mostly covered
in an appendix entitled “Special History of the Various Branches of Chemistry from
Lavoisier to the Present Day,” which is more like the bland historical introductions
of old-fashioned chemical papers and the older type of review article, in which
personal credit is not absent but is equally not given as emphatically as it is in the
main section. It is interesting how he distances himself to some degree from the
subject in these sections and how he clearly sees modern chemistry as beginning in
the Chemical Revolution, rather than, say, in the 1850s.
As “how we got here” histories, these early histories of recent chemistry had two
specific functions. The first was to teach chemistry using a historical framework. This
was more than the potted history at the beginning of a textbook that flourished in a
somewhat later period, and sought to impose a shared understanding of chemistry’s
development (for example, the importance of the overthrow of vitalism thanks to
Wöhler in the case of organic chemistry); the aim was, rather, to teach chemistry by
rehearsing its historical development. When Tilden published his course of “Lectures
to Working Men,” given annually by the professors at the Royal School of Mines and
the Royal College of Science (soon to become part of Imperial College), in 1899 as A
Short History of the Progress of Scientific Chemistry in Our Own Times, he was
anxious in his preface to emphasise: “I desire to point out that this does not profess
to be a text-book giving a complete picture of the state of knowledge and of theory
at the moment. Its object, as already stated, is to show by what principal roads
we have arrived at the present position, in regard to questions of general and
fundamental importance.”7 In other words, Tilden was writing a history of chemistry

5
T. E. Thorpe, History of Chemistry, vol. 2, From 1850 to 1910 (London, Watts, 1910). Volume 1, From the
Earliest Times to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, followed in 1914. The two-volume structure was
retained for the second edition of 1921, but they were published as one volume, the second volume being
entitled From 1850 to 1921. This title was retained for the second volume in the third edition of 1930, as
Thorpe had died in 1925 and no attempt was made to bring it up to date.
6
Ernst von Meyer, A History of Chemistry from Earliest Times to the Present Day, trans. George M’Gowan
(London: Macmillan, 1891).
7
W. A. Tilden, A Short History of the Progress of Scientific Chemistry in Our Own Times (London: Longmans,
Green, 1899), vi.
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 241

in terms of “how we got here.” In order to reach “here,” he goes up to the present,
and remarks that while it is often difficult to establish priority, he was able to write
authoritatively because: “My own recollections carry me back over more than half
the period referred to, and I am therefore in a position to speak with direct knowledge
of some of the subjects concerning which, in times to come, uncertainty would
be likely to arise.”8 This historical approach to explaining the course of chemical
research was particularly useful in the case of the elucidation of the structure of
the natural products and their synthesis. This treatment of the chemistry of natural
products survived until the 1970s in the second volume of Finar’s organic chemistry
textbook.9
In common with the later potted historical overviews of chemical textbooks, these
histories tried to shape younger chemists’ understanding of their history. As Big
Brother claimed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Who controls the past . . . controls the
future: who controls the present controls the past.”10 German chemists such as Kopp
and Meyer were anxious to show that synthetic organic chemistry was the result
of neither the pursuit of commercial gain (despite the best efforts of Hofmann and
Baeyer) nor the development of an atheistic antivitalist ideology (as Berthelot had
demanded), but rather a purely intellectual exercise dedicated to the elucidation
of chemical structures. In keeping with this pragmatic (and frankly nationalistic)
programme, it was portrayed as a largely German development even by the Manches-
ter-based Schorlemmer, although these historians could not completely disguise its
French and British origins.
Yet one must not overlook another major motivation for these early historians
of recent chemistry, namely a hankering for the old days when there were fewer
chemists, everyone knew each other, and everything was simple. In Germany, there
was also the memory of a seemingly purer period when reformers had high hopes for
the future. These somewhat maudlin recollections were the staple of chemists’ dinners
and Fests that were increasingly popular around the turn of the century, beginning
with the infamous Benzolfest in 1890 and culminating in the Mauve dinner of 1906.11
The senior chemists at these dinners would recall the early days usually in a wishful
manner, and this nostalgia is clear in some of these histories. The very title of
Wilhelm Hofmann’s collected obituaries of his colleagues, Zur Erinnerung an
vorangegangene Freunde,12 sums this up neatly. Although we might argue that
autobiographies are best regarded as sources rather than history in themselves,
they are often the only texts available for much recent chemistry, both in the late

8
Tilden, Short History, vi.
9
I. L. Finar, Organic Chemistry, vol. 2, Stereochemistry and the Chemistry of Natural Products, 4th ed. (London:
Longmans, 1968).
10
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, chapter 3 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969),
31.
11
For a masterly discussion of the Benzolfest, see Alan J. Rocke, Image and Reality: Kekulé, Kopp and the
Scientific Imagination (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2010), chapter 10, “Kekuleé’s Dreams.” For
the Mauve anniversary dinner, see Anthony S. Travis, “Decadence, Decline and Celebration: Raphael Meldola
and the Mauve Jubilee of 1906,” History and Technology 22 (2006): 131–52.
12
A. W. Hofmann, Zur Erinnerung an vorangegangene Freunde: Gesammelte Gedac̈htnissreden (Brunswick:
Vieweg, 1888). I would like to thank Jeffrey Johnson for his help with the literature of this aspect of German
history of chemistry.
242 PETER J T MORRIS

nineteenth century and now. The autobiographies of German chemists, published

almost invariably under variations of Aus meinem Leben (From my life), are often
nostalgic, notably those of Adolf von Baeyer13 and Richard Willstätter.14

Only physical chemistry matters

Kopp concentrated on atomic theory and the development of molecular structure,
although he did not ignore inorganic and organic chemistry. To be sure, by 1920,
there were specialised histories of organic chemistry by Schorlemmer,15 Edvard
Hjelt,16 and Carl Graebe,17 all of which went up to the near present, but, when
Tilden published his Short History in 1899, he established a template for histories of
chemistry for the next half century. He organised his material thematically rather
than chronologically, and concentrated on certain physical chemistry topics, specifi-
cally atomic weights, valency, stereochemistry, and electrochemistry. In contrast to
his successors, however, he also had a chapter on synthetical [sic] chemistry, which
is very detailed. An enduring feature of the history of recent chemistry between 1900
and the 1930s (and beyond) was an almost laser-like focus on ideas and physical
chemistry to the exclusion of organic chemistry, despite its dominance of academic
and industrial chemistry in this period. This may have been a result of general chem-
istry being equated with physical chemistry, thanks to Wilhelm Ostwald, but it also
reflected an acceptance by chemists of the intellectual superiority of physics. Although
he was professor of organic chemistry at MIT, Forris Jewitt Moore, in his history of
chemistry first published in 1918, could declare that: “In the discussion of later work,
also, the claim of a topic for consideration has been not its practical but its historical
importance. It has been asked, not whether the work was itself of value, but did it
contribute a new fundamental idea. For this reason, to cite a single instance, the work
of Werner on the metal-ammonias has been discussed at some length, while that of
Emil Fischer on the sugars has been dismissed with a single word.”18 Hence, the work
of Ostwald, Rutherford and the Braggs is covered in detail, and even the work
of Moseley on X-ray spectra a few years earlier, but only the coal tar industry and
tautomerism (because it was an idea) were considered worthy of mention in modern
organic chemistry.
A few years later in 1926, the Australian chemist and explosives expert Irvine
Masson, who had just moved to the University of Durham, made a quite different
excuse for concentrating on physical chemistry: “It remains only to caution non-
chemical readers that in the parts of the book which exhibit recent developments . . .
one wing of chemistry has been left almost undepicted. Organic chemistry is perhaps
the most fully elaborated section of the science; but its interferences depend upon

13
Adolf von Baeyer, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben 1835–1905 (Brunswick: Vieweg, 1905).
14
Richard Willstätter, From My Life: The Memoirs of Richard Willstaẗter. Translated from the German by
Lilli S. Hornig and edited in the original German by Arthur Stoll (New York: W.A. Benjamin, 1965).
15
Carl Schorlemmer, The Rise and Development of Organic Chemistry, revised ed. (London: Macmillan, 1894).
16
Edvard Hjelt, Geschichte der Organischen Chemie von ältester Zeit bis zur Gegenwart (Brunswick: Vieweg,
1916).
17
Carl Graebe, Geschichte der organischen Chemie (Berlin: Springer, 1920).
18
F. J. Moore, A History of Chemistry, 1st ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1918), v.
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 243

specialized information and nuances of qualitative behaviour which only trained

chemists can appreciate, and consequently there is here discussed only its general
bearings on the theme which the writer sees as the dominant intellectual aim of the
physical sciences.”19 In fact, recent chemistry (that is chemistry after 1800) is reduced
to being “The Search for the Structural Units,” i.e. the molecule, the atom, and the
ion. Masson mentions the then current valency theories of Bohr and Lewis, but the
level of description is very general, more like a chemistry textbook than a history of
chemistry, even of the potted variety.
Lowry shows a similar bias towards physical chemistry, and radioactivity in
particular. His history is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which
makes it difficult to assess completely its coverage of recent chemistry, but it is main-
ly the discovery of new elements (e.g. argon in air), radioactivity, and the concept
of isotopes. In the foreword for the 1936 edition, Lowry remarks: “As in 1926, the
opportunity has been taken to make a number of small alterations in the text; and
the chapter on ‘The Classification of the Elements’ has been once more reconstructed,
in order to show the present position in reference to missing elements, isotopes
and radioactivity.”20 A particularly recent topic in the 1915 edition was the work of
Dewar on the periodicity of atomic heat, published in 1913.21

History of recent chemistry under attack

From the 1930s onwards, the history of recent chemistry came under pressure
from two sides. Gradually, chemists began to question the need for chemistry under-
graduates to learn the history of chemistry — there was no longer a need to appeal
to an academic elite oriented towards history and classics — and as the demands of
the chemistry syllabus increased, with the introduction of new topics such as quantum
mechanics and organic reaction mechanisms, the history of chemistry disappeared
from the lecture schedules. Ingold still gave historical lectures at the evacuated
University College London chemistry department in Aberystwyth during World
War II, but such courses had vanished by the early 1960s.22 From the other side,
even before World War II, historians of chemistry (still largely chemists) questioned
the point of taking the history of chemistry up to the present. As the number of
developments taking place in chemistry multiplied, the authors of histories of chem-
istry either had to be selective, usually focusing on physical chemistry, or perforce
give very general surveys of these developments, lacking in both depth and analysis.
As we have seen, Lowry’s treatment of recent chemistry is like a chemistry textbook

19
Irvine Masson, Three Centuries of Chemistry: Phases in the Growth of a Science (London: Ernest Benn, 1925),
vi.
20
T. M. Lowry, Historical Introduction to Chemistry, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1936), ix.
21
T. M. Lowry, Historical Introduction to Chemistry, 1st ed. (London: Macmillan, 1915), 471–73.
22
For a discussion of this issue, see Mary Jo Nye, “The Chemical Past” (an essay review of four histories
of chemistry), Science 264 (13 May 1994): 997–99. Also see Theodor Benfey, “Teaching Chemistry Embedded
in History: Reflections on C. K. Ingold’s Influence as Historian and Educator,” Bulletin for the History of
Chemistry 32 (2007): 19–24. It is surprising that such an important process in the history of chemistry has
received so little attention from historians. One of the last history of chemistry courses for the entire chemistry
student body may have been given at St. Andrews by John Read before his death in 1963. The history of science
was (and remains) an option at Oxford, but it is taken by only a small minority of chemistry students.
244 PETER J T MORRIS

with the addition of names and dates. This brevity and its similarity to chemistry not
unreasonably raised the question of whether it served any purpose at all.
Partington’s famous Short History of 1937 is particularly important in this context,
as it illuminates the thinking of one of the most important founders of SHAC, who
was also a practising academic chemist at the time when the society was founded.
Clearly, Partington did not see his volume as a history of early chemistry — to quote
the preface, the “period before Boyle has been treated briefly” — but equally he
had no intention of covering recent chemistry in any depth: “The development of
Chemistry in the later part of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century is only
briefly sketched and illustrated by the work of a few outstanding chemists; this part
of the subject is dealt with in the ordinary lecture courses in Chemistry, and need
not be repeated in a book of this kind.”23 This remark suggested that Partington
may have felt that Lowry’s treatment of the subject was purely chemical and thus
unnecessary in a clearly historical work.24 His rejection of the history of recent
chemistry can thus be seen as an attempt to establish the history of chemistry as a
subject in its own right, quite separate from chemistry, and hence not simply an
alternative way of teaching chemistry. Certainly, earlier histories had regarded the
modern sections as a form of chemistry teaching. In his preface, Moore was quite
explicit: “Some modern topics, also, like the work of Werner just mentioned, or that
of Bragg upon X-ray spectra have been treated in considerable detail because they
are outside the field familiar to most undergraduates.”25 Surprisingly, in the light of
the clear bias of earlier authors, Partington stakes a claim for concentrating on
the history of physical chemistry in terms of its novelty: “Most histories of Chemistry
lay far too much emphasis upon Organic Chemistry, and there are several special
histories of this subject; more consideration has now been given to the important
development of Physical Chemistry, no special history of which has yet appeared.”26
On one level, as we have seen, Partington was correct, but he thus ignored the
consistent bias of most general histories of chemistry since the turn of the century
in favour of physical chemistry. And, of course, he was a professor of physical
chemistry. To be fair, in the “Summary and Supplement” conclusion to the relevant
chapters, he did give more coverage of modern organic and inorganic chemistry
than most of his contemporaries, although not to same extent as physical chemistry,
where there is coverage of the standard topics of the periodic law, dissociation,
radioactivity, and isotopes. But these supplements are almost entirely potted
biographies of contemporary or near-contemporary chemists, reminiscent to modern
readers of the biographical footnotes to Fieser and Fieser’s Advanced Organic
Chemistry.27
Hence, we can see why recent chemistry was not to be found in the pages of
Ambix, launched in the same year that Partington’s Short History was published.

23
J. R. Partington, A Short History of Chemistry (London: Macmillan, 1937), vii.
24
More pragmatically, as they were both published by Macmillan, he may have wished to avoid direct
competition with Lowry, whose book was more clearly aimed at chemists.
25
Moore, History of Chemistry, v.
26
Partington, Short History, vii.
27
Louis F. Fieser and Mary Fieser, Advanced Organic Chemistry (New York: Reinhold, 1961).
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 245

Such a subject would be indistinguishable from chemistry, and thus would add
nothing to the critical history of the subject. Partington and his colleagues may have
also doubted that such history could be written critically, given that the main actors
would still be alive and without the distance in time that was surely necessary to show
the historical importance of any particular development in chemistry, apart from such
obviously great advances as radioactivity or electronic theories of valency. There is a
whiggish element here. Without knowing what would succeed in the long run, how
could a historian (or a chemist) determine what was worth studying in historical
terms?
In this context, it is interesting to contrast two histories written after World War
II with each other and with Partington’s history. Berry’s Modern Chemistry is
uncompromising in its title, but its subtitle makes its purpose clear: “Some Sketches
of its Historical Development.” Berry makes the point in his preface that, in most
histories of chemistry, “the more recent developments in chemistry are of necessity
relegated to the later chapters, and the treatment of them is therefore correspond-
ingly curtailed.”28 In some respects, this is an odd statement, as most contemporary
histories of chemistry (Moore, Lowry, and Partington) were thematic in arrangement,
and if the modern developments were curtailed they were curtailed within a chapter,
not because they were in later chapters. Perhaps Berry was thinking mostly of Meyer’s
history, which he probably read as an undergraduate.
But rather than righting this wrong by writing a complete history of recent
chemistry, as one might have expected from his chosen title, Berry takes a different
tack; the purpose of his book is “to focus attention on the development of some of
the newer branches of chemical science.” Later in his preface, he excuses his focus on
physical chemistry: “In making a choice of subjects, the writer has been guided to
some extent by his teaching experience. Thus organic chemistry, on account of its
extensive and well-systemized character, would not have lent itself to satisfactory
treatment in a work of this kind — the little organic chemistry which it contains,
e.g. in the chapter on Stereochemistry, is really secondary to the main purpose of this
book.”29 So once again the ever-popular topics in the history of physical chemistry
— atomic theory, radioactivity, isotopes, and dissociation — are treated as if no-one
had ever covered them before. And, despite the title being being Modern Chemistry,
there is relatively little about chemistry after World War I and nothing about the
physical techniques such as infrared or ultraviolet spectroscopy that were about to
dominate chemistry.
Farber’s Evolution of Chemistry, published in 1952, is a marked contrast to both
Partington and Berry. A German by birth and education, Farber was an industrial
chemist who moved to the USA in 1938. He had written a history of chemistry in
German as early as 1921; this had covered the history of modern inorganic, organic
and physical chemistry, albeit with a strong bias towards such physical topics such
as coordination chemistry, stereochemistry, and radioactivity.30 He even had a section

28
A. J. Berry, Modern Chemistry: Some Sketches of Its Historical Development (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1946), ix.
29
Berry, Modern Chemistry, x.
30
Eduard Färber, Die geschictliche Entwicklung der Chemie (Berlin: Springer, 1921).
246 PETER J T MORRIS

on biochemistry, perhaps the earliest such coverage in a general history of chemistry.

The material covered generally stops around 1908, but there are references to events
up to 1918 at least. Another German chemist-historian, Paul Walden (best known for
his discovery of the “inversion” of optical activity in certain substitution reactions),
brought Graebe’s history of organic chemistry up to date in 1941.31 Here we can see
the anxiety of German chemists to retain their hold on the way in which the history
of organic chemistry was told at a time when the leadership of the field was clearly
passing from Germany to the USA. In keeping with this German version, Farber’s
later English volume is a comprehensive history, both in its timespan and in its
coverage of chemistry.32 The coverage is up to 1939, a similar gap to the 1921 volume
(thirteen years in both cases), and Farber retains his broad coverage of inorganic and
organic chemistry and biochemistry, in contrast to his English and American–English
colleagues. But much of this coverage is promised by the table of contents rather than
delivered in the text. In theory, it breaks new ground by covering synthetic polymers,
but in practice its account of the history of polymers is almost non-existent. It covers
barely one page and only mentions Hyatt and Baekeland; the later work of Staudinger,
Mark, Carothers and Flory passes completely without mention. Farber’s coverage of
organic chemistry and biochemistry is better but is almost entirely a description of
the chemistry involved, which is not dissimilar to the approach taken by most authors
of the Royal Society’s Biographical Memoirs.
If the history of recent chemistry was disappearing from books, it was practically
non-existent in historical journals. In this respect, Ambix was typical rather than
the exception. Isis was the first scholarly journal in the history of science when it
was founded in 1913, and although it appears in the first volume,33 the history of
chemistry was largely absent until 1925, and it made only occasional appearances
thereafter. The history of recent chemistry featured even less. With three minor
exceptions,34 the first history of recent chemistry paper, on resonance theory in
Soviet Russia, appeared in 1964.35 The first British history of science journal, Annals
of Science, has been one of the most important vehicles for papers in the history of
chemistry since it was founded in 1936, but the first paper on the history of modern

31
Paul Walden, Geschichte der organischen Chemie seit 1880 (Berlin: Springer, 1941). It was published as the
second volume of Graebe, Geschichte der organischen Chemie. The two volumes were reprinted by Springer
in 1972. Walden also published a brief and very general Geschichte der Chemie after World War II (Bonn:
Universitats-Verlag, 1947) in a history of science series. He takes the story up to the present and concentrates
(unsurprisingly) on organic chemistry. But the amount of detail on a given topic is minimal — Carothers and
Buna, for example, are covered in a single sentence between them.
32
Eduard Farber, The Evolution of Chemistry: A History of Its Ideas, Methods and Materials (New York:
Ronald Press, 1952).
33
For example, I. Guareschi, “Ascanio Sobrero nel centenario della sua nascita,” Isis 1 (1913): 351–58, which
actually falls within our definition of recent chemistry, as it deals with the 1860s, and even its main focus on
the late 1840s is only just outside the sixty-year limit.
34
Alex. C. Burr, “Notes on the History of the Experimental Determination of the Thermal Conductivity of
Gases,” Isis 21 (1934): 169–86; Eduard Färber, “Stoff und Form als Problem der biochemischen Forschung. Eine
geschichtliche Betrachtung,” Isis 21 (1934): 187–202; L. Zechmeister, “Mikhail Tswett — The Inventor of
Chromatography,” Isis 36 (1946): 108–9.
35
Loren R. Graham “A Soviet Marxist View of Structural Chemistry: The Theory of Resonance Controversy,”
Isis 55 (1964): 20–31.
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 247

chemistry did not appear until 1968.36 Based on an Oxford chemistry Part II thesis,
this paper was off the mainstream of the subject.37
The sole exception, and even then only marginally so, was the only other history
of chemistry journal in English. Chymia, published by the University of Pennsylvania,
was founded in 1948, but the first history of recent chemistry paper did not appear
until the sixth annual issue in 1960. There were no fewer than three papers in
this issue, but only one, on Michael Tswett, can be said to be squarely on recent
chemistry.38 Another paper,39 on the spectroscopist Johannes Rydberg, could be
considered to be as much physics as chemistry, and the modern period was only
part of the third paper, which was the development of chemical oceanography.40
Subsequently, there were eight papers on the history of recent chemistry between 1960
and the demise of Chymia in 1967, all of which were either by Farber (such as
the history of metal hydride chemistry in volume 841) or by Eastern Europeans
(for example, the history of the electronic theories of organic chemistry by G. V.
Bykov42).

The revival of the history of recent chemistry

As we have seen, Farber was almost the sole historian of recent chemistry in the
English-speaking world in the 1940s and 1950s, and he was from Germany. From
the late 1950s onwards, however, there was a small but growing band of chemist-
historians, mostly but not entirely American, who sought to write the history of
recent chemistry. The foremost member of this group was Aaron Ihde, a chemist at
the University of Wisconsin who had transferred to the history of science department
in 1957. He not only supervised several students who were later influential in the
field, but also wrote The Development of Modern Chemistry.43 As it was published
in 1964, the same year as the fourth volume of Partington’s massive history of chem-
istry, which only covered the perennial topics of radioactivity, atomic structure and
valency in the modern era, one might have hoped from the title that Ihde would go
up to the present. Ihde himself remarked: “On the other end of the time span, most

36
P. M. Heimann, “Moseley and Celtium: The Search for a Missing Element,” Annals of Science 23 (1967):
249–60 (actually published in January 1968).
37
The Oxford University “Part II” is a short thesis produced in the fourth year of the chemistry degree, after the
main examinations have been taken at the end of the third year. It is similar in many respects to an MSc or
MPhil thesis, but does not have a taught element, being purely research. Originally, it led to the award of a
BSc, and it now results in the award of an MChem, but inbetween it was simply part of the BA (Hons) in
chemistry. For many years, since 1961 if not earlier, a small minority of these theses have been on a historical
topic. A partial list can be found at http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/hsmt/courses_reading/undergraduate/chemistry/
theses.htm (accessed 7 August 2011).
38
Trevor Robinson, “Michael Tswett,” Chymia 6 (1960): 146–61.
39
Sister St. John Nepomucene SND, “Rydberg: The Man and the Constant,” Chymia 6 (1960): 127–45.
40
Edward D. Goldberg, “Chemists and the Ocean,” Chymia 6 (1960): 162–79.
41
Eduard Farber, “The Development of Metal Hydride Chemistry,” Chymia 8 (1962): 165–80.
42
G. V. Bykov, “Historical Sketch of the Electron [sic] Theories of Organic Chemistry,” Chymia 10 (1965):
199–253.
43
Aaron Ihde, The Development of Modern Chemistry (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). This history was
given an extended life and a wider audience through its republication by Dover Publications in 1984.
248 PETER J T MORRIS

historians of chemistry have been content to stop at the beginning of the twentieth
century. This has been true despite the fact that more advances in chemistry have
taken place since 1900 than in all previous centuries combined. Although there are
obvious pitfalls in dealing with the history of recent events, these must no longer serve
as excuses for avoiding this century which is so rich in chemical discoveries.”44 One
assumes that Ihde was thinking of Partington’s Short History and perhaps Berry’s
Modern Chemistry (or its successor, From Classical to Modern Chemistry45), for his
strictures were not valid for Farber’s volume. And perhaps Ihde had encountered
Thorpe, Tilden and Moore as an undergraduate, and did not take into account
that early twentieth-century chemistry was recent chemistry for such authors (and
that Thorpe died before he could update his final edition). As is often the case,
Ihde’s history is divided by topic rather than chronologically. It covers all the major
branches of chemistry at least up to World War II and, in many cases, up to the 1960s
(for example, covering nuclear magnetic resonance and noble gas compounds). The
price of such extensive coverage is, once again, extreme brevity. Silicones, noble gas
compounds, mass spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance all get slightly less
than a page each. But at least Ihde took the story up to the present, and he was not
biased in favour of physical chemistry, as earlier authors had been.
Following the lead of Ihde, there is a very small group of professional historians
of science who publish on the history of recent chemistry, most notably John Servos,
who published the first paper in Ambix to fall unequivocally within our sixty-year
period in the November 1976 issue,46 Robert Kohler, whose papers on the Irving–
Langmuir valency theory appeared in the successor to Chymia,47 and Mary Jo Nye,
who has worked on the boundary between chemistry and physics.48 These professional
historians have tended to publish in mainstream history journals, but have done so
relatively infrequently and across a range of journals, which means that the number
of papers on the history of recent chemistry in any one of these journals has remained
low. Indeed, two of the five papers on the history of recent chemistry published
in Isis in the 1980s were written by Russian historians of science, showing the
continuing influence of Eastern Europe in the subject.49

44
Ihde, The Development of Modern Chemistry, xi.
45
A. J. Berry, From Classical to Modern Chemistry: Some Historical Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1954). This book was also given an extended life and wider audience through its republication
by Dover Publications in 1968.
46
John W. Servos, “The Knowledge Corporation: A. A. Noyes and Chemistry at Cal-Tech, 1915–1930,” Ambix
23 (1976): 175–86.
47
Robert E. Kohler, Jr., “The Origins of G. N. Lewis’s Theory of the Shared Pair Bond,” Historical Studies
in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 343–76; Robert E. Kohler, Jr., “Irving Langmuir and the ‘Octet’ Theory
of Valence,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 4 (1974): 39–87; Robert E. Kohler, Jr., “The Lewis–
Langmuir Theory of Valence and the Chemical Community, 1920–1928,” Historical Studies in the Physical
Sciences 6 (1975): 431–68.
48
For example: Mary Jo Nye, “Nonconformity and Creativity: A Study of Paul Sabatier, Chemical Theory, and
the French Scientific Community,” Isis 68 (1977): 375–91; Mary Jo Nye, “Historical Sources of Science-as-
Social-Practice: Michael Polanyi’s Berlin,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37 (2007):
409–34.
49
L. M. Pritykin, “The Role of Concepts of Structure in the Development of the Physical Chemistry of Polymers,”
Isis 72 (1981): 446–56; Yakov M. Rabkin, “Technological Innovation in Science: The Adoption of Infrared
Spectroscopy by Chemists,” Isis 78 (1987): 31–54.
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 249

Rather, it was a number of American chemists-historians who preserved the

history of recent chemistry in the 1970s and 1980s. The most prolific member of
this group is George Kauffman, who was inspired by Ihde to enter the history of
chemistry, and, like those of many chemist-historians, his first paper arose out of his
chemical research (and does not count as recent chemistry).50 He specialises in the
history of coordination chemistry, and hence often publishes papers that are on
the very edge of our definition of recent chemistry. A good example is his paper on
the history of stereochemistry of trivalent nitrogen compounds,51 which was the first
paper on the history of recent chemistry in Ambix when it appeared in the July 1972
issue, thirty-five years after the journal was founded, but it barely meets the sixty-year
rule. Other members of this group concentrated on the history of organic reaction
mechanisms and physical organic chemistry, notably Stanley Tarbell, John Wotiz,
Martin Saltzman, Leon Gortler, and a British chemist-historian, John Shorter. They
tended to publish in chemical journals rather than historical journals.52 None of these
five historians has published in Ambix but, like Kauffman, Saltzman has published
frequently in the Journal of Chemical Education. Indeed, the history of recent
chemistry generally appeared in the general chemical literature in this period, such as
Chemistry in Britain and Education in Chemistry. The history of the recent chemistry
associated with the chemical industry was covered by the magazine of the Society of
Chemical Industry, Chemistry and Industry. More specialised fields had their own
niches. The history of the noble metals was covered in Platinum Metals Reviews,
founded in 1957 and edited by Leslie B. Hunt and his assistant Peta Buchanan, who
both had an interest in the history of chemistry, and the history of chromatography
(mainly by Leslie Ettre) in Chromatographia.
Between 1978 and 1980, a group of chemist-historians (not particularly historians
of recent chemistry) led by John Wotiz tried to persuade the American Chemical
Society (ACS) to establish a base to help chemists research and write the history of
chemistry. In the summer of 1979, Wotiz and Ned Heindel visited the inspiration for
this idea, the American Institute of Physics’ Center for the History of Physics (which
had been founded as far back as 1961) in New York City. They also called on Bill
Bailey, the then chair of the ACS Board at the University of Maryland, and visited
ACS headquarters in Washington DC.53 En route between New York and Washing-
ton, they met Arnold Thackray at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. As
well as being head of the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, he was
also the librarian of the Edgar Fahs Smith Library of the History of Chemistry, the
former publisher of Chymia. He embraced the idea enthusiastically, and the Center
for the History of Chemistry (CHOC) was founded at the University of Pennsylvania

50
George B. Kauffman, “Frédéric Swarts, Pioneer in Organic Fluorine Chemistry,” Journal of Chemical
Education 32 (June 1955): 301–3; personal communication from George Kauffman dated 10 July 2011.
51
George B. Kauffman, “The Stereochemistry of Trivalent Nitrogen Compounds: Alfred Werner and the
Controversy over the Structure of Oximes,” Ambix 19 (1972): 129–44.
52
For example, both Saltzman and Shorter contributed to a special issue of Natural Products Report devoted
to Sir Robert Robinson: M. D. Saltzman, “The Development of Sir Robert Robinson’s Contributions to
Theoretical Organic Chemistry,” Natural Products Report 4 (1987): 53–60; J. Shorter, “Electronic Theories of
Organic Chemistry: Robinson and Ingold,” Natural Products Report 4 (1987): 61–66.
53
Personal communications from Leon Gortler dated 27 June 2011, and from Jeffrey Sturchio dated 6 July 2011.
Also see CHOC News 1 (October 1982): 3–5.
250 PETER J T MORRIS

in 1982, located at the Edgar Fahs Smith Library and the Department of the History
and Sociology of Science in the Edgar Fahs Smith Building (now demolished).54
CHOC was not formally envisaged or established as a centre for the history of recent
chemistry. However, Thackray realised that it had to concentrate on recent chemistry
in order to maintain the support of its initial funders, the ACS and the American
Institute of Chemical Engineers, and to attract the interest of chemists and chemical
engineers within these organisations. Concentrating on recent chemistry would
also help CHOC to obtain the financial support of chemical corporations and wealthy
chemists, without whose donations the centre could not continue to exist, let alone
expand. Although originally a historian of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-
century history of chemistry, Thackray himself had recently moved into the field with
his project on the history of chemistry in America since 1876, published with his
students in 1985 as Chemistry in America: 1876–1976: Historical Indicators.55 It is
striking that two of the leading historians of chemistry in Britain and the USA —
Colin Russell and Arnold Thackray — studied the recent history of the chemical
profession in their countries in the 1970s and 1980s, yet produced books that
were strikingly different, although they shared some similarities and reached similar
conclusions.56
The firms involved in the setting up of CHOC — Rohm & Haas, DuPont, and
Dow — had major interests in polymers, and it was thus logical for the new centre
to concentrate on the history of polymers through its “Polymer Project,” which ran
until 1988. Subsequent research projects have had a similar modern orientation, such
as biotechnology, modern organic chemistry, and electronics chemistry. In addition
to CHOC News (now Chemical Heritage), the early projects led to various books
on the history of recent chemistry.57 Another important contribution to the history
of recent chemistry by CHOC was its oral history programme, which carried
out detailed and well-researched interviews with many leading chemists, mainly
American, and with, in its early years, a bias towards polymer chemists.58
The successors of CHOC — the Chemical Heritage Foundation and its Beckman
Center for the History of Chemistry — also support external scholars through their
fellowship programmes and have thus enabled the publication of works on the
history of chemistry beyond its own projects. These include one of the first scholarly
histories of chemistry to appear since Ihde’s Development of Modern Chemistry,

54
“The Power of John C. Haas’s Good Name.” Available at: http://www.chemheritage.org/about/history/
chf-founders/2011-05-16-john-c-haas.aspx (accessed 20 July 2011).
55
Arnold Thackray, Jeffrey L. Sturchio, P. Thomas Carroll and Robert Bud, Chemistry in America 1876–1976:
Historical Indicators (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985).
56
Colin A. Russell, Noel G. Coley and Gerrylynn K. Roberts, Chemists by Profession: The Origins and Rise of
the Royal Institute of Chemistry (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1977).
57
Peter J. T. Morris, Polymer Pioneers: A Popular History of the Science and Technology of Large Molecules
(Philadelphia, Penn.: Center for History of Chemistry, 1986); Eric Elliott, Polymers and People: An Informal
History (Philadelphia, Penn.: Center for History of Chemistry, 1986); Peter J. T. Morris, The American
Synthetic Rubber Research Program (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Mary Ellen
Bowden and Theodor Benfey, Robert Burns Woodward and the Art of Organic Synthesis (Philadelphia, Penn.:
Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, 1992).
58
“Oral History Program.” Available at: http://www.chemheritage.org/research/policy-center/oral-history-
program/index.aspx (accessed 20 July 2011).
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 251

namely William H. Brock’s Fontana History of Chemistry, published in 1992.59 Brock

decided to cover the whole of the history of chemistry up to the present, but, rather
than attempt to cover everything very briefly, Brock wisely chose to cover topics that
he felt were significant in a given period, such as organic synthesis in the 1950s and
1960s and, for the first time in a history of chemistry, chemistry and the environment
in the post-war era. But he was selective as an experienced historian rather than as
a chemist, thus avoiding a bias in favour of physical chemistry or molecular biology
because they are scientifically fashionable. By the late 1990s, CHOC’s own publica-
tions, by contrast, although excellent, were rarely mainstream histories of chemistry.
One thinks, for example, of its publications on the economics of the chemical
industry, the pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology, and electronics.
The chemist-historians had hoped that CHOC would revive Chymia or produce a
similar journal that would be more open to working chemists than the professional
history of science journals, but this had not transpired by the mid-1980s. A young
member of this group, William Jensen, then realised that the PC revolution had made
desktop publishing a reality, and when he was appointed the Oesper Professor of the
History of Chemistry and Chemical Education at the University of Cincinnati in 1986,
he had found a base from which to found a new journal.60 Thus, the Bulletin for the
History of Chemistry was founded in 1988 as the journal of the History of Chemistry
Division of the ACS. While, like CHOC, the Bulletin is not explicitly an organ of the
history of recent chemistry, given its chemist-historian base, the history of recent
chemistry often features in its pages, probably more so than in any other history of
science journal apart from Kagakushi, the very similar Japanese-language history of
chemistry journal. There were twenty-eight papers on the history of chemistry in the
twentieth century in the Bulletin according to the OCLC History of Science, Technol-
ogy and Medicine (HSTM) database. Kagakushi, founded in 1974, is particularly
strong in the history of recent chemistry, especially the development of chemical
technology. According to the OCLC HSTM database, there were twenty-nine papers
on chemistry in the twentieth century in Kagakushi between 1986 and 2000.61
Yet perhaps the most important development in the history of recent chemistry was
the fruit of one man’s persistence — the Profiles, Pathways and Dreams series of
chemical autobiographies. Jeffrey Seeman conceived the idea of the series, persuaded
many leading historians of chemistry to write them, and then edited them himself.
Fortunately, he pitched the idea to the ACS in 1986, when it was eager to publish
the history of chemistry (partly because of its association with CHOC), and eventu-
ally twenty-two volumes appeared between 1990 and 1998. Seeman was able to
badger his eminent authors into providing more details of their personal life and/or
better explanations of their chemistry, which makes this series a first-rate (but
currently underutilised) source for the history of modern organic chemistry. and
meanwhile, like the older German autobiographies in their era, it serves as the only
available history for much of recent organic chemistry.

59
W. H. Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry (London: Fontana, 1992).
60
Personal communication from William Jensen dated 27 June 2011.
61
Also see http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/kagakushi/Table_Content.html (accessed 20 July 2011).
252 PETER J T MORRIS

History of recent chemistry in the twenty-first century

The dawn of the twenty-first century was a potential turning point for the history of
recent chemistry, with the setting up of the Commission for the History of Modern
Chemistry (CHMC) under the umbrella of the Division of History of Science of the
International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUPHS). It was established
by Christoph Meinel, another historian of chemistry, who had mainly worked in
earlier periods himself. As a result of the conferences held in the 1990s under the
umbrella of his “Evolution of Chemistry in Europe, 1789–1939” project, funded by
the European Science Foundation, he had come to realise that the recent chemistry
was the most neglected part of the history of chemistry, and by professional historians
in particular. He proposed the setting up of the commission at the final conference
of the “Evolution of Chemistry” programme at Delphi in Greece in 1996, and it was
approved by IUPHS a year later. It immediately established a conference programme,
the first meeting (“Research in the German Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industry,
1900–1945”) being held at the Deutsches Museum in Munich in June 1998. This was
followed by a conference on the disciplinary boundaries of chemistry in the twentieth
century, also in Munich, a year later, and a workshop on the instrumental revolution
in chemistry in London in August 2000.62
The two CHMC conferences were published as multi-author volumes, and thus
made an important contribution to the literature.63 This was particularly true for the
volume on the instrumental revolution, as it also reprinted three key papers on the
subject that had originally been published elsewhere.64 Books by single authors have
also been important for a subject with such a low profile in journals. One thinks,
for example, of John Servos’s Physical Chemistry65 and Yasu Furukawa’s Inventing
Polymer Science.66 The early years of the twenty-first century have seen an increase
in their number and quality. To give just three examples, there has been the volume
on Robert Burns Woodward by the author and Theodor Benfey,67 Luigi Cerruti’s
history of recent chemistry in Italy,68 and Carsten Reinhardt’s close analysis of the
impact of mass spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance on chemistry.69 More
recently, we have seen the publication of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent’s book on

62
See http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_I/Philosophie/Wissenschaftsgeschichte/CHMC.htm (accessed
20 July 2011).
63
Carsten Reinhardt, ed., Chemical Sciences in the 20th Century: Bridging Boundaries (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH,
2001); Peter J. T. Morris, From Classical to Modern Chemistry: The Instrumental Revolution (Cambridge:
Royal Society of Chemistry, 2002).
64
Rabkin, “Technological Innovation in Science”; Peter J. T. Morris and Anthony S. Travis, “The Role of
Physical Instrumentation in Structural Organic Chemistry in the Twentieth Century,” in Science in the
Twentieth Century, ed. J. Krige and D. Pestre (Reading: Harwood, 1997): 715–39; Davis Baird, “Analytical
Chemistry and the ‘Big’ Scientific Instrumentation Revolution,” Annals of Science 50 (2006): 267–90.
65
John W. Servos, Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
66
Yasu Furukawa, Inventing Polymer Science: Staudinger, Carothers and the Emergence of Macromolecular
Chemistry (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Philadelphia, 1998).
67
Otto Theodor Benfey and Peter J. T. Morris, Robert Burns Woodward: Architect and Artist in the World of
Molecules (Philadelphia, Penn.: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2001).
68
Luigi Cerruti, Bella e potente: la chimica del Novecento fra scienza e societaÌ (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2003).
69
Carsten Reinhardt, Shifting and Rearranging: Physical Methods and the Transformation of Modern Chemistry
(Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications/USA, 2006).
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 253

nanotechnology.70 As one might expect, many of these books have a particular appeal
for chemists, for example John Rowlinson’s history of cohesion.71
The mid-1990s also saw the founding of two journals in the philosophy of
chemistry — Hyle, by Joachim Schummer in 1995, and Foundations of Chemistry,
by Eric Scerri in 1999 — that often contain papers relating to the history of recent
chemistry if not specifically being on the history of recent chemistry. The philosophy
of chemistry has also led to the publication of several books that contain material on
the history of recent chemistry, including Davis Baird’s philosophical exploration of
the broader instrumental revolution in recent chemistry,72 a multi-author volume on
the image of chemistry,73 and Eric Scerri’s reexamination of that scientific icon, the
periodic table,74 sparking off a debate that is still continuing.75 Another important
development was the setting up in 2005 of the Center for Contemporary History and
Policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, which incorporated the foundation’s
very successful oral history programme.76 It has produced a number of books, reports,
conference proceedings, and scholarly papers, mostly on electronics, nanotechnology,
and environmental chemistry.77
The revival of the history of recent chemistry can also be seen in the general
histories of chemistry that have appeared in the twenty-first century. While Trevor
Levere’s history of chemistry78 is in the traditional mould, with its focus on pneu-
matic chemistry and physical chemistry, including the rise of electronic valency
theory, he does bring the story up to the present in the final chapter, which covers
contemporary topics such as DNA, Buckminsterfullerene, and pollution, albeit
briefly. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Jonathan Simon’s Chemistry: The Impure
Science79 is of a completely different order. Philosophical in tone, it represents a
new kind of history of chemistry that is rooted in the latest scholarship. It is also

70
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Les vertiges de la technoscience: Façonner le monde atome par atome (Paris:
Editions La Découverte, 2009).
71
John S. Rowlinson, Cohesion: A Scientific History of Intermolecular Forces (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
72
Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California
Press, 2004).
73
Joachim Schummer, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, ed., The Public Image of
Chemistry (Singapore: World Scientific, 2007).
74
Eric R. Scerri, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
75
See, for example, the sometimes heated exchanges in the Chem-Hist electronic forum in early August 2011.
76
See http://www.chemheritage.org/research/policy-center/index.aspx (accessed 7 August 2011).
77
For example: David C. Brock, ed., Understanding Moore’s Law: Four Decades of Innovation (Philadelphia,
Penn.: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2006); Hyungsub Choi, Sarah Kaplan, Cyrus C. M. Mody and Jody A.
Roberts, Setting an Agenda for the Social Studies of Nanotechnology: A Summary of the Joint Wharton-
Chemical Heritage Foundation Symposium on Social Studies of Nanotechnology (Philadelphia, Penn.: Wharton
Business School and Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2008); and Gwen Ottinger, “Epistemic Fencelines:
Air Monitoring Instruments and Expert–Resident Boundaries,” Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the
History and Philosophy of Science 3 (2009): 55–67, available at http://spontaneousgenerations.library.utoronto.
ca/index.php/SpontaneousGenerations/article/view/6115 (accessed 29 September 2011).
78
Trevor H. Levere, Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
79
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Jonathan Simon, Chemistry: The Impure Science (London: Imperial College
Press, 2008).
254 PETER J T MORRIS

fully aware of recent chemistry, and while it is thematic in organisation rather than
chronological (thus sharing an approach that goes back to Tilden, if not earlier), there
are many examples of recent chemistry in the text, not least nanotechnology. So we
can say conclusively, with the earlier volume by Brock, that the divorce between the
history of chemistry and recent chemistry has finally ended, at least for the authors
of general histories of chemistry.
However, this revival, if it exists, has not extended to the publications of papers.
According to the OCLC HSTM database, the number of papers on the history of
chemistry in the twentieth century rose from thirteen in 1990 to forty-one in 1991,
and reached a peak of seventy-eight in 1997. It then declined sharply to twenty-three
in 2001, and has remained in the doldrums ever since. If we look at the mainstream
journals of the history of science, such as Isis, Annals of Science, and the British
Journal for the History of Science, they account for eight papers between them
between 2001 and 2010 inclusive, which suggests at best a holding of the line rather
than a revival. This is illustrated by the fact that two historians — Ana Simoes and
Carsten Reinhardt — account for half of these papers.80 One must also mention
Leo Slater, who has published two papers in other mainstream history of science
journals.81 In recent years, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A has
become a significant force in this field. No fewer than five papers on the history of
recent chemistry have been published in that journal since 2001. Given that a histo-
rian of recent chemistry has been the editor of Ambix since November 2001, it is
not so surprising that Ambix has participated in the revival of the history of recent
chemistry. Between 2001 and 2010, there were no fewer than twenty such papers.
Chemist-historians still produce more papers than professional historians, but they
now tend to publish in the Bulletin or Chemical Heritage, rather than the Journal
for Chemical Education. The number of papers on the history of chemistry in the
twentieth century in the Bulletin between 2001 and 2010 — according to the OCLC
HSTM database — was fifty-nine. The corresponding figure for Kagakushi was
thirty-five. Largely thanks to the efforts of Alan Dronsfield, Education in Chemistry
has continued to publish peer-reviewed papers on the history of recent chemistry. By
contrast, Chemistry and Industry, formerly a strong supporter of the history of recent
chemistry, has ceased to publish historical articles.

80
Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simões, “Preparing the Ground for Quantum Chemistry in Great Britain: The Work
of the Physicist R. H. Fowler and the Chemist N. V. Sidgwick,” British Journal for the History of Science 35
(2002): 187–212; Ana Simões, “Textbooks, Popular Lectures and Sermons: The Quantum Chemist Charles
Alfred Coulson and the Crafting of Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 37 (2004): 299–342.
Also see: Ana Simões, “A Quantum Chemical Dialogue Mediated by Textbooks: Pauling’s The Nature of the
Chemical Bond and Coulson’s Valence,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 62 (2008): 259–69;
Carsten Reinhardt, “Chemistry in a Physical Mode. Molecular Spectroscopy and the Emergence of NMR,”
Annals of Science 61 (2004): 1–32; and Carsten Reinhardt, “A Lead User of Instruments in Science. John D.
Roberts and the Adaptation of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to Organic Chemistry, 1955–1975,” Isis 97 (2006):
205–36.
81
Leo B. Slater, “Woodward, Robinson, and Strychnine: Chemical Structure and Chemists’ Challenge,” Ambix
48 (2001): 161–89; Leo B. Slater, “Instruments and Rules: R. B. Woodward and the Tools of Twentieth-
century Organic Chemistry,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 33 (2002): 1–33.
 THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HISTORY OF RECENT CHEMISTRY 255

Does the history of recent chemistry have a future?

Originally, the history of recent chemistry was simply a matter of chemist-historians
bringing the subject up to current practice, whether they were writing general histo-
ries of chemistry or more specialised works. I call this “how we got here” history.
The history of recent chemistry since the founding of SHAC in 1935 has always been
the preserve of a few working chemists and professional historians of chemistry with
a strong chemical background. After a sharp decline in the 1940s and 1950s, when
the leadership of the profession gradually passed from chemists to full-time historians
of chemistry, the history of recent chemistry was kept alive by Eduard Farber, work-
ing almost alone in the USA, and by Russian (and other Eastern European) chemists
publishing English-language papers. It was then revived to a modest degree in the
1960s by several American chemists, notably George Kauffman. More recently, from
the 1980s onwards, it has been promoted by two mainstream historians of chemistry,
who themselves often worked on earlier periods, because they saw the need to main-
tain the organic connection between chemists and the history of chemistry. In order
to appeal to chemists, it became necessary to once again tell the story of “how we
got here.” However, the main burden of keeping the subject alive still fell largely on
chemist-historians. One problem has been the lack of an obvious intellectual rationale
for studying the history of recent chemistry or, given the declining interest on the part
of professional chemists, a clear audience.
At the present time, despite the success of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the
CHMC and the Bulletin, it is hard to say whether the subject is on the rise. It might
seem that the history of recent chemistry has turned a corner with the publication of
more papers in Ambix and more scholarly books on specific themes. Yet, in other
respects, the future is still uncertain. I have already referred to the fall in the number
of scholarly papers produced in the twenty-first century as compared with the last
decade of the twentieth century. And the average age of historians of recent chemistry
is rising rapidly. While several young scholars have taken up the history of chemistry
in recent years, they are generally interested in alchemy and early chemistry. Potential
recruits have usually regarded the history of recent chemistry as uncritical in terms
of a social critique, as well as being simplistic historiographically, and they have often
gone into science and technology studies. However, recent chemistry does not seem
to feature any more strongly in science and technology studies or the sociology of
science than in mainstream history of science. More alarmingly for a subject that has
always relied heavily on chemists, there is scant evidence of young chemists entering
the ranks of professional historians or even working as active amateur chemist-
historians. Equally worryingly, chemists writing about the history of recent chemistry
pay little attention to the work or methods of professional historians.82 The standing
of the history of recent chemistry also varies from country to country, with a flourish-
ing community of scholars in America and Japan, less so in Europe, and much less
so in Britain, despite a consistently high level of historical Part IIs being produced in
Oxford, often on the history of recent chemistry.
What can we do to encourage the history of recent chemistry? Writing the history
of recent chemistry is not easy.83 One needs to know current chemistry very well
82
See my review of Jerome Berson’s Chemical Creativity in Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 23 (2000): 66–68
for a critique of many working chemists’ approach to the history of chemistry.
83
For an extended discussion of the problems of writing the history of recent chemistry, see Peter J. T. Morris,
“Writing the History of Modern Chemistry,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry. 32 (2007): 2–9.
256 PETER J T MORRIS

and, to a large extent, so does the reader. Chemistry is now vast in terms of both
publications and personnel. The scientific literature is now both complex and
jargon-laden; there has been a sharp drop in the accessibility of the literature for the
nonspecialist since the 1970s. As we have seen, the history of recent chemistry easily
collapses into bite-sized chunks of pure chemistry. Hence, chemists or historians need
lots of encouragement to tackle the history of recent chemistry. One way to do this
is offer awards and grants as part of the broader development strategy of SHAC. This
has already begun with the foundation of the Morris Award for the history of recent
chemistry and the history of the chemical industry, and a prize for the best historical
Oxford Part II. Given the need for a high level of chemical expertise to write the
history of recent chemistry, more must be done to encourage young chemists to take
up the history of chemistry either professionally or as active amateurs. In order to do
this, we need the active support of the national chemical societies; while they are
already supportive, more concrete assistance is needed. If chemistry faculties would
allow more historically inclined (or, better still, historically trained) chemists to teach
chemistry without having to do much chemical research (a certain amount would be
beneficial to both sides), this would transform the subject. The creation of permanent
academic posts in this way would benefit students (as these teaching fellows would
be good at using history to make chemistry more interesting and comprehensible), the
faculties themselves, by providing good teaching without major research overheads,
and the history of recent chemistry, by providing historians with a grounding in
recent chemistry and the time to carry out historical research. But it is not clear how
universities can be persuaded to make this possible, even if they would save money
in these financially difficult times.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank several colleagues who gave me information and/or made
suggestions for improvement after reading a draft of this paper, including Marco
Beretta, William H. Brock, Leon Gortler, Ernst Homburg, William Jensen, Jeffrey
Johnson, George Kauffman, Christoph Meinel, Carsten Reinhardt, Martin Saltzman,
Leo Slater, and Jeffrey Sturchio. Any mistakes that remain are, of course, entirely my
own.

Notes on contributor
Peter J. T. Morris, who was recently appointed Keeper of Research Projects in the
Research & Public History Department at the Science Museum, has written on many
aspects of recent chemistry. He has published books on the history of synthetic rubber
and polymers, modern chemical instrumentation and the work of Robert Burns
Woodward. He has also published popular articles about the history of chemistry in
several journals, notably Chemistry and Industry and Education in Chemistry. Morris
was awarded the Edelstein Award for the history of chemistry in 2006. He is cur-
rently writing a history of the chemical laboratory from 1650s to 2000 to be published
in 2013 by Reaktion Books. Address: The Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London
SW7 2DD, UK. Email: peter.morris@NMSI.ac.uk.
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