Evan Hepler-Smith, Duke University
"Chemical ciphers: war and peace"
ABSTRACT: This chapter, drawn from my book manuscript of the above title, examines information technologies as infrastructure for chemical research in Germany, the US, and the UK during and after World War 2. Chemistry's print-based information infrastructure (handbooks, abstract journals, indexes, nomenclature schemes) enabled war-oriented chemical research projects of novel scale and scope. These projects, wartime pressures, and (in Germany) Nazi persecutions stressed that vital infrastructure to the breaking point. This ws a problem for academic and industrial chemists who saw German, American, and British reference works as a vital basis for their research. While postwar IT entrepreneurs eager to sell machine methods took a keen interest, this was not about replacing print with electronic information systems. Rather, "literature chemists" (a nascent interdisciplinary profession) put machines to work supporting the restoration and rationalization of print compilation, further entrenching print-based conventions for identifying and classifying chemical substances in terms of molecular structure. Building on Bill Rankin's insights regarding the Cold War development-economics context for the emergence of "infrastructure" as a category of economic analysis, this chapter scrutinizes decisions to expend considerable resources in rescuing some of chemistry's canonical printed information resources (and not others). This chapter traces this story through the wartime crash searches for antimalarials, herbicides, insecticies, and nerve gases, and the postwar consolidation of these projects through the articulation of a category of "biologically-active chemical substances." I would also be interested in feedback on the way I am approaching information history in this project as a whole.
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