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. (shrink)

This essay examines the early career of the chemist Emil Erlenmeyer (1825–1909), focusing on his various endeavors in industrial consulting and entrepreneurship, and his eventual decisive turn, in 1862, to academic research and teaching. This case study offers insights into the developing relationship between theory-based academic research and artisanal and industrial practice in the German states during the 1850s and 1860s. Attention is paid to the relevance of this material to the contemporary historiography of “technoscience.”.

The authors discuss Popper's and Kuhn's theories of science and consider whether these can explain the real course taken by the history of science, that is the real behaviour of scientists seen in an historical light. It has mainly to do with the problem of what criteria influence scientists in deciding on the acceptance of one of several possible theories. The authors postulate the necessity of introducing the category of "objective technological Erkenntnisinteresse" to help solve the problem. They illustrate this (...) by analysing the various models of the structure of Benzol, proposed by Kekulé, Claus and Ladenburg. According to the authors, Popper and Kuhn cannot explain the fact that the model of Kekulé was readily accepted. It can however be explained with the category of Erkenntnisinteresse. (shrink)

In its attempt to achieve acknowledgement and support as a true science and academic discipline eighteenth-century chemistry experienced that the traditional distinction between theory and practice, respectively between science and art, was an incriminating heritage and did not longer conform to the way chemists saw themselves. In order to substitute the former, socially judging classification into theoretical science and practical art, J. G. Wallerius from Uppsala coined the term pure and applied chemistry in 1751. The idea behind this new conception (...) was that it ought to be chemistry's research aim and not the kind of work, be it manual or intellectual, which was to decide about its branches and their dignity. The change in orientation which took place during the eighteenth century, and which is symbolized by the new dichotomy “pure and applied”, led towards a revaluation of the utilitarian aspects of chemistry. Its historical roots reach back to a long and fruitful cooperation of, and interaction between chemistry and economy, which was reinforced by the Stahlian tradition in Germany and Scandinavia. Subsequently, it was its strong economic bias that helped chemistry to become institutionalized and accepted as an academic discipline distinct from the medico-pharmaceutical profession. The analysis of this change of attitudes, behaviour and institutional pattern suggests that, at least during the period of institutionalization of this particular discipline, social structures and the intrinsic scientific contents are so tightly interrelated, that any division into “internal”, cognitive developments and “external” conditions would be artificial, since they both constitute the scientific community as a context of argumentation and action. (shrink)