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A History of Industrial Chemistry
How bulk chemical manufacturing grew up beside factories, from sulfuric acid and soda to fertilizer, dyes and plastics, and what drove each step.
Energy and Water
Chemistry Discoveries
Chemical ideas and processes that shaped industry and daily life.
Alchemy and the Roots of Chemistry
What alchemists actually did, the furnaces and flasks they used, and how their craft slowly gave way to chemistry between the 1600s and 1700s.
Bakelite and the Age of Plastics
How Leo Baekeland's phenol-formaldehyde resin became an early fully synthetic plastic, and how molding turned it into radios, phones and electrical parts.
Gunpowder and Explosives Chemistry
A historical look at black powder's origins in China, its spread, and the later nineteenth-century explosives: guncotton, nitroglycerin, dynamite and smokeless powder.
Petroleum Refining and Kerosene
How distilling crude oil into kerosene gave households a cheap lamp fuel in the 1850s, and how refining grew once gasoline found a market.
Rubber Vulcanization
How heating rubber with sulfur turned a sticky, temperature-sensitive material into a durable one, and the tangled Goodyear and Hancock patent story.
Soap Making and Saponification
How fat and alkali became soap, how the soap trade developed from ancient times, and how cheap soap shaped cleanliness and public health.
The Periodic Table and Organizing the Elements
How chemists tried to order the elements before and after Mendeleev's 1869 table, including Newlands, Meyer, and the priority disputes around the periodic law.
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