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Compound Words is an intellectual, social, and political history of modern chemistry’s canonical systems of information management, and the role of information management in the making of modern chemistry, circa 1870-1970. Systematic chemical names—names enacting a “molecular ideal” yoking material substances, molecular structures, and chemical classifications—were not just transcriptions of nature. Chemical handbooks were not just storehouses of data. Rather, Compound Words argues, these information technologies were products of, tools for, and infrastructure guiding chemical science and industry’s world-making, world-breaking growth.

Part I uncovers the role of reference book writing and reading in the intellectual, industrial, and professional development of chemistry in nineteenth century Europe and fin-de-siècle North America. Compiling handbooks and codifying nomenclatures went hand-in-hand with the growth of commercial enterprises, transatlantic organizations, and visions of global chemical empire, linked by an aspiration to total access to published research via the molecular ideal.

Part II traces how, over the first few decades of the 20th century, such aspirations gave rise to national chemical societies and an International Union dedicated to supporting the production of reference works. Two such publications, the German Beilsteins Handbuch der organischen Chemie and the American Chemical Abstracts, loomed large in efforts to wage World War and make peace through chemical indexing, and in the formation of the professional specialization of “literature chemistry.”

Part III shows how texts like Beilstein and Chemical Abstracts helped lay a foundation for the massive growth of chemical science and industry before, during, and after World War II, and how budget crunches, Nazi race laws, wartime crises, and large-scale research projects of the 1930s-50s threatened the future of chemistry’s critical “information infrastructure.” In response, during the 1950s and 1960s, US and European governments, chemical manufacturers and publishers, and computing entrepreneurs made common cause, entrenching the molecular ideal within the databases and file formats of digital chemistry, and within new bureaucratic organs for governing drugs, industrial chemicals, and environmental health.