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The early history of chemical engineering: a reassessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Clive Cohen
Clive Cohen
Affiliation:
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ.
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Extract

Very few historians have so far turned their attention to the history of chemical engineering, a discipline which impinges on aspects of industrial life as diverse as the manufacture of consumer goods and the generation of nuclear power. However, a number of practising and retired chemical engineers have produced accounts of the late nineteenth-century beginnings and subsequent development of chemical engineering. Their work has set the scene for more recent papers by two academic historians, Colin Divall and James F. Donnelly. There are two particular issues which are frequently discussed, and about which there is a general consensus in this body of work: the origins of academic chemical engineering, and the ways in which its development in the United States differed from that in Europe. In this paper I shall cast doubt on the now conventional picture of these two aspects of the history of chemical engineering.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 171 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1996

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References

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66 Emeritus Professor of chemical engineering (Imperial College), R. W. H. Sargent used a late edition of the Principles as a textbook after the Second World War (personal communication).

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101 In his pamphlet Science, Technology and the British Industrial ‘Decline’, 1870–1970 (forthcoming), David Edgerton demonstrates convincingly that ‘despite constant arguments that scientists and engineers had more influence in other countries, British higher education, the British state, and British industry were, if anything, peculiarly scientific and technological’.

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106 In this respect, the situation was similar to that found by Edgerton and Horrocks for industrial R & D, namely, that it ‘may be that British firms were more like American firms, or German firms, than historians have allowed’. See Edgerton, D. E. H. and Horrocks, S. M., ‘British industrial research and development before 1945’, Economic History Review (1994), 47, 235.Google Scholar