[Athena] Club d'histoire de la chimie. séance 3 juin. Kaiser's Chemists (1905-1915) par Prof J.A. Johnson

[dymfau2 <dymfau2 AT orange.fr>]

Prochaine séance du Club d’histoire de la chimie: SCF- 250 rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris

 

Mercredi 3 juin de 10h à 12h

 

Conférence du Professeur Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Villanova University, Pennsylvanie, USA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Kaiser’s Chemists:  Academic-industrial cooperation, institutional innovation, and the mobilization of science in Imperial Germany, 1905-1915

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  This lecture will discuss the efforts of a group of leading German academic and industrial chemists to create a national research institute for chemistry in Berlin during the decade before the First World War.  This project had grown out of the academic-industrial symbiosis that had promoted the growth of chemistry in Germany since the 1860s.  Thus after the initial proposal for an institute primarily funded by the national government failed to gain sufficient bureaucratic support, the proponents created an organization for industrial investment in academic chemical research.  This organization had a major influence on the creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of the Sciences (forerunner of today’s Max Planck Society), and as a result most of the earliest Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes promoted chemical research, often interdisciplinary.  Their creation took place against a background of increasing international tensions, however, bringing an increasingly nationalistic tone to the rhetoric of the proponents and supporters of the institutes.  It was thus no coincidence that after the outbreak of war in 1914, chemists associated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society played the central role in mobilizing academic and industrial science for the war effort, thereby becoming, in effect, the “Kaiser’s chemists.”

ENTREE LIBRE

RER B : station Luxembourg; Bus 21, 27 : arrêt Gay-Lussac Saint-Jacques

 

Bus 82, 38 : arrêt Abbé de l’Épée