Three essays--on the historiography of the chemical process industries, on business archives, and on oral history in the corporate setting--provide the context for extensive annotated bibliographies in the three areas

Fred Aftalion's international perspective of the history of chemistry integrates the story of chemical science with that of chemical industry. This new edition includes events from 1990 to 2000, when major companies began selling off their divisions, seeking to specialize in a particular business. Aftalion explores the pitfalls these companies encountered as well as the successes of "contrarians"--those companies that remained broad and diversified. He uses BASF, Dow, and Bayer as examples of true contrarians.

American Synthetic Organic Chemicals Industry: War and Politics, 1910-1930

The dean of business historians continues his masterful chronicle of the transforming revolutions of the twentieth century begun in Inventing the Electronic Century. Alfred Chandler argues that only with consistent attention to research and development and an emphasis on long-term corporate strategies could firms remain successful over time. He details these processes for nearly every major chemical and pharmaceutical firm, demonstrating why some companies forged ahead while others failed. By the end of World War II, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries were transformed by the commercializing of new learning, the petrochemical and the antibiotic revolutions. But by the 1970s, chemical science was no longer providing the new learning necessary to commercialize more products, although new directions flourished in the pharmaceutical industries. In the 1980s, major drug companies, including Eli Lilly, Merck, and Schering Plough, commercialized the first biotechnology products, and as the twenty-first century began, the infrastructure of this biotechnology revolution was comparable to that of the second industrial revolution just before World War I and the information revolution of the 1960s. Shaping the Industrial Century is a major contribution to our understanding of the most dynamic industries of the modern era.

In the twentieth century, dyes, pharmaceuticals, photographic products, explosives, insecticides, fertilizers, synthetic rubber, fuels, and fibers, plastics, and other products have flowed out of the chemical industry and into the consumer economies, war machines, farms, and medical practices of industrial societies. The German chemical industry has been a major site for the development and application of the science-based technologies that gave rise to these products, and has had an important role as exemplar, stimulus, and competitor in the international chemical industry. This volume explores the German chemical industry's scientific and technological dimension, its international connections, and its development after 1945. The authors relate scientific and technological change in the industry to evolving German political and economic circumstances, including two world wars, the rise and fall of National Socialism, the post-war division of Germany, and the emergence of a global economy. This book will be of interest to historians of modern Germany, to historians of science and technology, and to business and economic historians.

This is the story of how Dow's bleach works developed into one of the largest most diversified chemical companies in the world. Each of several protagonists in the book has helped fashion the company through his own influence and determination. Chemist and founder Herbert Henry Down, his son Willard Dow, and others. Company executives, employees, and retirees were interviewed about the men, the events, and the decisions of which they had first-hand knowledge.

As the focus of protest against a hated war in Vietnam it became one of the best-known company names in America almost overnight during the 1960s. "Dow makes napalm, napalm kills babies," chanted student protesters on hundreds of campuses during that war. "Dow shalt not kill." This feisty company did not back off from making napalm (it was the only U.S. company that did not), and it was soon embroiled in other front-page controversies--Agent Orange, dioxin, and mercury contamination of the Great Lakes among them. Typically, when EPA planes flew over its plants taking photos, Dow sued. Growth Company is the story of a century of industrial drama told by an insider who has been associated with the firm and its top managers since 1953. Written in celebration of the firm's 100th anniversary, it traces the rise of an archetypical growth company from its unlikely beginnings in a dying lumber town in the backwoods of central Michigan. Later a Wall Street favorite, it made many of its early investors wealthy; it has not missed or decreased a dividend since 1911. Based on research in the Dow corporate archives, supplemented by oral history interviews with more than 150 company pioneers, this colorful panorama of growth is told in terms of the people who built this unique and spectacularly successful world-class company, beginning with Herbert H. Dow, the young genius who founded the firm, down to the son of Greek immigrants who heads the company today.