The emergence of research laboratories in the dyestuffs industry, 1870–1900

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the emergence of the research laboratory as an organizational entity within the company structure of industrial firms. The thesis defended is that, after some groundwork by British and French firms, the managements of several of the larger German dye companies set up their own research organizations between the years 1877 and 1883. The analysis of the emergence of the industrial research laboratory in the dyestuffs industry presented here makes clear that both the older study on the subject by John J. Beer and a later paper by Georg Mseyer-Thurow contain some serious defects. Beer, like so many other authors of the 1950s who studied the ‘marriage’ between science and industry during the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’, incorrectly correlates the engagement of university-educated chemists with the rise of industrial research. The appointment of academic chemists by BASF and Hoechst at the end of the 1860s, for instance, was described as ‘the…acquisition of a research staff’. This reveals a misunderstanding of the roles of chemists within the nineteenth-century chemical industry. University-trained personnel were, in fact, working in industry as early as the start of the nineteenth century. However, they were employed as managers, works chemists and analysts, and only exceptionally in research.