Book manuscript submitted! Dissertation (2016) accessible here.

Chemistry is a science of substances and a science of information. The first definition goes without saying; the second verges on heresy. Yet these dimensions of modern chemistry are intimately linked. The shared information base of this vast and disparate field hangs together via references to millions of chemical substances. Conversely, among the many ways chemists identify substances, the most prevalent were tailored for working with chemical information. Compound Words: Chemical Information and the Molecular Ideal reconstructs efforts to gather, organize, and make accessible the total published record of chemistry on a substance-by-substance basis. Following this history from the 1760s through the 2010s, Compound Words chronicles how such work—chemical documentation—became a distinct field of scientific specialization, and how practitioners of this art created an information infrastructure anchored in chemical reference publications. Though little noticed by non-chemist contemporaries and latter-day historians, chemical documentation has been essential to modern chemistry, distinct from but deeply interconnected with histories of chemical experimentation, chemical theories, chemical industries, chemical instruments, and chemistry’s myriad implications for material culture, human health, the environment, and the regulatory state. Chemical documentation underpinned chemistry’s continuities and rifts across geographic boundaries and political conflicts, as well as the unity of chemistry across diverse scientific and industrial terrain. Not least, chemical documentation shaped how chemists divided up the material world. Compound Words argues that pragmatic demands of chemical documentation—naming chemical compounds as a basis for organizing and consulting chemical reference works—were key factors in the ascendancy of atom-by-atom molecular structure as a default conception of what chemical substances are. This equation of material substance, molecular structure, and chemical name, which Compound Words terms “the molecular ideal,” was born of print. Yet it raised tantalizing prospects for using mechanical and electronic media to cope with the ever-present challenge of chemical information overload. Enthusiastic tinkering with novel devices and mathematico-logical techniques for putting the molecular ideal into practice helped give rise to the omnibus discipline of information science. In the process, such efforts built a world-spanning information base for chemical science and industry—and for ever more urgent efforts to regulate chemical hazards.

Chapter 1 surveys how European chemists of the late 18th through late 19th centuries pursued an accounting of known chemical substances that pointed the way toward not-yet-known substances to search for or create. Chapter 2 surveys the development of chemical documentation in 19th-century Europe, tracing the emergence of the crucial reference genres of handbooks and abstract journals and their increasingly intricate substance-by-substance organization. Chapter 3 focuses on late 19th century nomenclature reform efforts that gave rise to the molecular ideal, tied to cutting-edge research, pedagogical reform, and reference literature compilation. Chapter 4 addresses how the German Chemical Society amassed a portfolio of chemical reference publications knit together via substance-specific citations, and how policymakers in Germany and its World War I adversaries came to see control of such reference literature as a key to national competitiveness. Chapter 5 turns to the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts (CA), founded in 1907, and to the editors whose nomenclature-packed subject indexes made CA an indispensable resource. Chapter 6 argues that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), founded in 1919, survived uncertain beginnings by serving as an intermediary between reference editors and a steward of the molecular ideal. Chapter 7 shows how World War II stressed chemical documentation to the breaking point, and how postwar rescue efforts simultaneously reinforced traditional organs of chemical documentation and pathbreaking efforts to realize the molecular ideal on machines. Chapter 8 traces the emergence of “literature chemistry” in the 1950s, a field centered on the molecular ideal and its prospective mobilization on machines, central to the growth of both industrial chemistry and information science in postwar America. Chapter 9 surveys the development of chemistry’s digital information infrastructure from the 1950s through the 2010s, tracing how, supported by US federal funding, the American Chemical Society’s CAS Registry became a de facto international standard for science and governance alike, giving rise to some of the key ambiguities and dilemmas characterizing chemical regulation into the 21st century.