ABSTRACT
The chemical industry today ranges across more than 70,000 products, comprising paints, pharmaceuticals, soaps, cosmetics, plastics, dyestuffs, explosives. The boundaries of 'chemical industry' are often somewhat confused. Also, statistics regularly lump together very different kinds of products, such as inexpensive sulfuric acids and expensive dyes or fibers. The German chemical industry benefited strongly from German human capital, but mostly so from the 1870s-1880s onwards, at a time when the German industry was already ahead. William H. Perkin's 1856 discovery of the first synthetic dye signals the origins of the modern chemical industry. Until then, Britain and France had been the dominant nations, and chemical industry more or less exclusively about inorganic chemistry. In the synthetic dye industry, scientific progress led more or less directly to industrial success. Also, the chemical industry is at heart a very generic technology, and has given rise to a number of breakthroughs in other areas.
