Across the spectrum: a prelude to the industrial chemistry symposium from the CSC 2008 conference co-chair.

Which came first--chemical research or industrial chemistry?

It takes but a moment of thought to affirm that the latter was far and away earlier, indeed dating back from prehistoric times. The making of beer and wine, smelting of metals, manufacture of lime to name but very few, were large scale, economically and socially very important industrial chemical processes.

I happen to own a French Dictonnaire de Chymie dated 1778. In it there are many descriptions, some of them quite cryptic, of what today we would call industrial processes. But the element oxygen isn't even mentioned in the book since Lavoisier had not yet declared his seminal discovery. Industrial chemists of the day were successfully producing materials in quantity, but without knowing the fundamentals of what they were doing.

Slowly, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, research revealed the reasons why these processes worked. As a result, existing processes were refined to produce products of better quality and yield and many new angles of attack became possible.

Today, industrial chemical …