Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Chemistry, Society, and Environment. A New History of the British Chemical Industry edited by Colin A. Russell The Royal Society of Chemistry: Cambridge, 2000. xvi + 372 pp. ISBN 0-85404-599-6. £59.50. reviewed by Conrad Stanitski
This highly documented book is a joint effort by editor Colin A. Russell in conjunction with four other colleagues, all of whom have been members of the History of Chemistry Research Group in the Department of History of Science and Technology at the Open University. Previous histories of the British chemical industry have either featured a broadbrush approach or focused on individual companies. This book takes a different tack, emphasizing instead the impact and direct effects the British chemical industry has had and continues to have on British society as well as the environment. Chemistry, Society, and Environment gives a thorough description of the British chemical industry, beginning with its prehistory. But it must be said forthrightly that the book is definitely not a paean to that industry. Rather, it purports to represent things as they are “warts and all”, and succeeds in doing so in an unconstrained manner. It is the contention of the authors that this approach actually casts the industrial chemical enterprise in a more favorable light than normal in the eyes of the popular press. Chapter 1 gives a quick accounting of the sources (primary, written, and otherwise) used to produce the work. The next two chapters provide an overview of the scope (Chapter 2) and the origins (Chapter 3) of the chemical industry. These are followed by coverage of the alkali industry (Chapter 4) and the nitrogen industry (Chapter 5). Other inorganic industrial products, including metals and their extraction and refining, are reviewed in Chapters 7 and 10, respectively. Organic-chemistry-based industries, including pharmaceuticals and polymers, are treated in three chapters (6, 8, and 9). The book concludes with a particularly effective chapter entitled Chemical Industry and the Quality of Life. This chapter describes ways in which the British chemical industry has ad-
dressed health and environmental issues, beginning with the Alkali Acts (1863), which restricted emissions to combat the conspicuous air pollution present since the earlier part of the 19th century. The chapter includes an extended section, Consumer Benefits from the British Chemical Industry, and concludes with an excellent “walk through” of the stages, and the difficulties in each one, faced by chemical manufacturers in bringing a commercial product from the research laboratory bench to market. This latter treatment is helpful for chemists lacking industrial experience, and especially for historians of chemistry whose research does not deal with industrial processes. The eleven-chapter book is generously laden with illustrations of persona, processes, and facilities. As is common in such histories, there are separate indexes of subjects and persons, each helpful in its detail. In addition to the sources given in Chapter 1, the book is solidly documented; footnotes abound, covering earlier and recent works. The authors assume readers to have some chemical understanding, and consequently use chemical terminology and reactions, but not in an overbearing or obtrusive manner. This treatment does not get in the way of an informed reader. As for any British work, American readers will have to make the British-toAmerican English translations of occasional nonchemical terms, but this is not burdensome. There is a downside to the book, although not much of one. As might be expected of a book involving several authors, there is an unevenness due to somewhat differing writing styles and approaches to subjects. The writing is livelier in some chapters than others. These drawbacks are, however, not sufficient to be onerous or distracting. Indeed, this book represents a major work, one that tells the story of the British chemical industry’s development and progress in a fresh, new, intelligent manner. The documentation and the treatment of topics make it a particularly functional reference work for those whose interests are with the British chemical industry. It will also prove useful for those desiring to compare such developments in Britain with their analogs “across the pond” here in America. Conrad Stanitski is in the Chemistry Department, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR 72035;
[email protected].
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 79 No. 5 May 2002 • Journal of Chemical Education
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