Selling Science: Dutch Debates on the Industrial Significance of University Chemistry, 1903-1932

The intensive contacts between academic and industrial chemistry, which grew in germany after the mid-19th century, remained unique to that country for quite a long time. As a number of contributors to this volume suggest (petri on italy; macleod and travis on britain; kragh, lundgren and myllyntaus on scandinavia), the ties between academia and the corporate world were considerably less strong in many other european nations right up to world war i. At the start of the century the situation in the netherlands was hardly different: university research and industrial production were quite unrelated activities and a ph.d. In chemistry generally did not pave the way to employment in a private company. In 1908, industry employed less than 10 per cent of university graduates.1 so while dutch science was going through its “second golden age” and van’t hoff had ushered academic chemistry into prosperity too, the chemical industry virtually sat by and watched from a distance.keywordsroyal academyapply scientific researchscience professordutch scienceacademic chemistthese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.