chemical industry

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Chemical Industry. The largest industry in America, the chemical industry supplies roughly a quarter of the world's chemicals, more than any other nation. In the Colonial Era, chemical manufacturing was confined to such rudimentary products as indigo dyes, naval stores, leather, glass, soap, and candles. In the early 1800s, producers relied heavily on imports of alkalies (especially soda ash, caustic soda, and bleach) from Great Britain. The typical nineteenth‐century American chemical manufactory was owner‐managed, employed eight to twelve workers, and served local markets. Philadelphia, an industry center, hosted the first professional organization (Chemical Society of Philadelphia, 1792) and publication (American Journal of Pharmacy, 1825). The DuPont Corporation, a giant in the chemical industry, had its origins in 1802, when E.I. du Pont started a gunpowder company near Wilmington, Delaware.

In the late nineteenth century, American producers excelled at prospecting, mining, smelting, and refining iron ore, coal, copper, lead, zinc, tungsten and other inorganic minerals into fertilizers, explosives, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid. Progress with dyestuffs, coal‐tar compounds, and other organics accelerated after the adoption of the Solvay process, a commercial technology for the manufacture of sodium carbonate, in the 1880s. Some American firms, exploiting abundant hydroelectric power, became large producers of electrochemicals. In 1914, inorganic chemicals accounted for roughly half of U.S. production; organics for about one‐quarter; and acids and electrochemicals for one‐quarter.

American producers made significant progress in advanced technologies (pharmaceuticals, dyestuffs, and fine chemicals) in the early twentieth century. Vital to the World War I military effort, the industry was supported by tariffs and the government's confiscation and licensing of key German technologies, especially dyestuffs and the Haber‐Bosch process for nitrogen fixation. Between 1900 and 1930, the U.S. chemical industry's growth far outstripped that of Germany or Great Britain. Rapid expansion of the automotive industry in the 1920s spurred demand for thermoplastics, protective coatings, and petroleum products. A merger wave in that decade created Allied Chemical and Dye and Union Carbide and Carbon, which joined Du Pont and American Cyanamid as the nation's largest producers. Robust sales of rayon, cellophane, pesticides, fertilizers, and other key products in the 1930s earned the industry a reputation as “depression proof.” Leading firms invested heavily in research and development, opening some 430 new laboratories between 1918 and 1945.

World War II brought heavy government involvement through an enormously successful synthetic‐rubber program; aggressive investment in government‐owned, company‐operated plants; and a new round of German technology confiscation. The postwar decades brought both a petrochemicals “revolution” and new challenges. Exploiting abundant oil and natural gas sources, American chemical and petroleum companies mass‐produced such “miracle” plastics as polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinylchloride. Foreign competition and the energy crisis of the 1970s led to overcapacity and falling profits. Meanwhile, the industry confronted new regulatory controls in the early 1970s, following public outcry over the health and environmental risks of agricultural chemicals and water‐and airborne wastes. In 1984, methyl isocymate gas escaping from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed more than three thousand people and injured thousands more. Despite its problems, however, the American chemical industry was one of the few key sectors of the American economy to retain its global dominance at the end of the twentieth century.
See also Carson, Rachel; du Pont, Pierre; Environmentalism; Factory System; Mass Production; Petroleum Industry; Research Laboratories, Industrial.

Bibliography

Williams Haynes , American Chemical Industry, 6 vols., 1945–1954.
Ashish Arora,, Ralph Landau,, and and Nathan Rosenberg , Chemicals and Long‐Term Economic Growth, 1998.

David B. Sicilia

chemical industry the business of using chemical reactions to turn raw materials, such as coal, oil, and salt, into a variety of products. During the 19th and 20th cent. technological advances in the chemical industry dramatically altered the world's economy. Chemical processes have created pesticides and fertilizers for farmers, pharmaceuticals for the health care industry, synthetic dies and fibers for the textile industry, soaps and beauty aids for the cosmetics industry, synthetic sweeteners and flavors for the food industry, plastics for the packaging industry, chemicals and celluloid for the motion picture industry, and artificial rubber for the auto industry.

History

Chemical industries can be traced back to Middle Eastern artisans, who refined alkali and limestone for the production of glass as early as 7,000 BC, to the Phoenicians who produced soap in the 6th cent. BC, and to the Chinese who developed black powder, a primitive explosive around the 10th cent. AD In the Middle Ages, alchemists produced small amounts of chemicals and by 1635 the Pilgrims in Massachusetts were producing saltpeter for gunpowder and chemicals for tanning. But, large-scale chemical industries first developed in 19th cent. In 1823, British entrepreneur James Muspratt started mass producing soda ash (needed for soap and glass) using a process developed by Nicolas Leblanc in 1790. Advances in organic chemistry in the last half of the 19th cent. allowed companies to produce synthetic dyes from coal tar for the textile industry as early as the 1850s.

In the 1890s, German companies began mass producing sulfuric acid and, at about the same time, chemical companies began using the electrolytic method, which required large amounts of electricity and salt, to create caustic soda and chlorine. Man-made fibers changed the textile industry when rayon (made from wood fibers) was introduced in 1914; the introduction of synthetic fertilizers by the American Cyanamid Company in 1909 led to a green revolution in agriculture that dramatically improved crop yields. Advances in the manufacture of plastics led to the invention of celluloid in 1869 and the creation of such products as nylon by Du Pont in 1928. Research in organic chemistry in the 1910s allowed companies in the 1920s and 30s to begin producing chemicals for oil. Today, petrochemicals made from oil are the industry's largest sector. Synthetic rubber came into existence during World War II, when the war cut off supplies of rubber from Asia.

Since the 1950s growing concern about toxic waste produced by chemical industries has led to increased government regulation and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (1972). The leakage of toxic chemicals at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal , India (1984), was the worst industrial disaster in history and heightened public concern about lax environmental regulations for chemical companies in developing countries. Beginning in the 1980s, U.S. corporations faced expanding competition from foreign producers, including some Third World oil producers who have set up their own oil refining and petrochemical industries. In 1997 the U.S. chemical industry produced about $389 billion worth of products and employed 1,032,000 workers. It exported about $71 billion worth of chemicals.

Bibliography

See K. Lanz, Around the World with Chemistry (1980); G. Taylor, Du Pont and the International Chemical Industry (1984); W. Morehouse, The Bhopal Tragedy (1986); F. Aftalion, A History of the International Chemical Industry (1991); A. Heaton, ed., The Chemical Industry (2d ed., 1994).

chemical industry. The most significant concentration of chemical manufacturing activity in Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries was oriented towards supplying the linen industry with chemicals for finishing and bleaching. In Cork the manufacture of gunpowder at Ballin colling from the late 18th century down to the early 1900s was an important industry. The manure and fertilizer industry was also important in both Cork and Dublin. There were a number of soap factories in Dublin and Belfast, and from the mid‐1890s explosives were made in Arklow.

Andrew Bielenberg