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Nitrogen Capture

The Growth of an International Industry (1900–1940)

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  • © 2018

Overview

  • Highlights the international development of the synthetic nitrogen industry including its global impact and role in increasing crop yields

  • Describes how the synthetic nitrogen industry became a forerunner of the 20th-century chemical industry in Europe

  • Includes information on the synthetic nitrogen industry in Japan and the role this had on the industrialization of colonial Korea

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Table of contents (21 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

This monograph provides an account of how the synthetic nitrogen industry became the forerunner of the 20th-century chemical industry in Europe, the United States and Asia. Based on an earlier SpringerBrief by the same author, which focused on the period of World War I, it expands considerably on the international aspects of the development of the synthetic nitrogen industry in the decade and a half following the war, including the new technologies that rivalled the Haber-Bosch ammonia process. Travis describes the tremendous global impact of fixed nitrogen (as calcium cyanamide and ammonia), including the perceived strategic need for nitrogen (mainly for munitions), and, increasingly, its role in increasing crop yields, including in Italy under Mussolini, and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The author also reviews the situation in Imperial Japan, including the earliest adoption of the Italian Casale ammonia process, from 1923, and the role of fixed nitrogen in the industrialization of colonial Korea from the late 1920s. Chemists, historians of science and technology, and those interested in world fertilizer production and the development of chemical industry during the first four decades of the twentieth century will find this book of considerable value.  

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Anthony S. Travis

About the author

Anthony S. Travis is deputy director of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published extensively on the history of chemistry and chemical technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Travis is recipient of four awards for his contributions to the history of chemistry.

He has edited and co-edited several volumes and special issues of journals dealing with the history of science, technology and the environment. Publications include: The Rainbow Makers; The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Lehigh: Lehigh University Press, 1993); (with Carsten Reinhardt) Heinrich Caro and the Creation of Modern Chemical Industry (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); Dyes Made in America, 1915-1980: The Calco Chemical Company, American Cyanamid, and the Raritan River (Jerusalem: Edelstein Center/Hexagon Press, 2004); and most recently The Synthetic Nitrogen Industry in World War I: Its Emergence and Expansion (Heidelberg: Springer, 2015).

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Nitrogen Capture

  • Book Subtitle: The Growth of an International Industry (1900–1940)

  • Authors: Anthony S. Travis

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68963-0

  • Publisher: Springer Cham

  • eBook Packages: Chemistry and Materials Science, Chemistry and Material Science (R0)

  • Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-68962-3Published: 07 May 2018

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-09859-9Published: 24 January 2019

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-68963-0Published: 24 April 2018

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XXI, 411

  • Number of Illustrations: 69 b/w illustrations, 48 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: History of Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Industrial Chemistry/Chemical Engineering

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