Not Counting Chemistry: How We Misread the History of 20th-Century Science and Technology

David Edgerton

The hydrogenation of coal was just one of a number of hydrogenation processes that came into use in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A second hydrogenation technology was used to make margarine mainly from nondairy fats, a vital resource at a time when dairy fat was precious. One remarkable and little-known consequence of this technology was the creation of a vast new 20th-century whaling industry. By 1914 whale oil was already being hydrogenated for margarine by the emerging great margarine firms, but by the 1930s this was its main use. The 1920s and 1930s saw a huge expansion in whaling in the South Atlantic, using large factory whaling ships. Whale oil was ultimately used to make some 30% to 50% of all European margarine at this time. During 1931 South Atlantic whale oil production equaled French, Italian, and Spanish olive oil production combined. Mainly consumed in Germany, Britain, and Holland, the whale-oil supply was dominated by the Anglo-Dutch firm Unilever. (Today most margarine is made by hydrogenating vegetable oils.)

Unilever was forced by the new Nazi government to finance the building of a German-flagged whaling fleet, making Germany a whaling nation for the first time. The first floating factory built in Germany, the Walter Rau, named for the owner of the main German margarine firm, went to the southern oceans in the mid-1930s. In its first season it processed 1,700 whales. From these it produced 18,264 tons of whale oil, 240 tons of sperm oil, 1,024 tons of meat meal, 104 tons of canned meat, 114 tons of frozen meat, 10 tons of meat extract, 5 tons of liver meal, 22 tons of blubber fiber, and 11 tons of glands for medical experiments. By 1939 the Germans were deploying 5 owned and 2 chartered factory ships. The Japanese also went into large-scale whaling at this time. After World War II Germany was prevented from whaling for some years, and its factory ships were used by other powers. Whaling boomed, and up to 20 floating factories were operating in the Antarctic, more than ever before. But the catch never reached the peaks of the 1930s, and the industry collapsed in the early 1960s. What we have considered a 19th-century industry is better seen as a mid-20th-century industry, one so rapacious that it destroyed itself in a way its 19th-century predecessor lacked the technology to achieve.

A third hydrogenation process was to have longer-lasting and much greater effects and is somewhat better known outside the ranks of historians of chemistry: the hydrogenation of nitrogen to produce ammonia, from which nitrates are derived. As an invention and innovation story it is placed before World War I, but in terms of how it changed the world it must be placed after the second world war rather than the first. For it was only then that nitrate in vast quantities became central to agriculture, such that by the end of the century one-third of the nitrogen in human food came from human-made nitrate.

The phrase green revolution is applied to the introduction of new agricultural plant varieties, fertilizers, and techniques to the developing world in the 1960s. Partly because agriculture is associated with poverty and the past and partly because of historians’ focus on novelty, an even more significant agricultural revolution in the developed world has been missed. In the developed world the years after 1945 saw a profound revolution in agriculture. Changes in the labor productivity rate, mainly owing to mechanization but also to nitrates, were greater than those in industry or services and were at a much higher level than ever before. This change resulted in enormously increased outputs combined with rapidly falling labor inputs. Land productivity also increased tremendously, such that the already large gap in productivity between the developed and the developing world widened further after World War II. In Britain, where productivity was already quite high, yields doubled in the postwar years. The later green revolution of the 1960s narrowed the gap in some parts of the developing world that this earlier green revolution had created. But, for example, Japan still leads the rest of Asia in the productivity of its rice paddies. Furthermore the United States remained a major wheat exporter, but increasingly to the developing world. It exported wheat to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s on a large scale. It remains a major producer of raw cotton, whose major export market was once Britain but is now the poor countries of the world, where the cotton spinning industry is concentrated. Of course nitrates are not the only cause; many other products of the chemical and other industries are involved. But these unheralded changes have had a profound effect.