This book constructs a history of Newtown Creek’s industrial expansion during the period that began in the 1840s and continued through the early years of the 20th century. In that period, the production of reagent chemicals and refined materials near the center of modern-day New York City grew steadily, as practitioners, alert to European advances in chemical science, developed and applied increasingly sophisticated technologies. Innovations in methods of production, ready access to domestic and international markets, and sustained growth in volumes of production at Newtown Creek in the late 19th century had profound consequences for the practice of industrial chemistry in the United States and for the economic vitality of the City of New York. Industrial practice progressed from the recovery of animal tissues to the refining of crude petroleum and the production of high-purity copper and other metals from mineral ores. With attention to each company’s technical expertise and principal products, this book examines the interdependence of the chemicals- and materials-producing industries that thrived along Newtown Creek’s shores. The author recounts Newtown Creek’s industrial history alongside the stories of well-known New Yorkers – Peter Cooper, Charles Pratt, John D. and William Rockefeller – and other less celebrated or less notorious characters.
This book provides a valuable account of New York’s history in the manufacture of reagent chemicals and refined fuels and metals and will appeal to researchers, scholars and historians interested in the early years of industrial chemistry.
Table of Content
Newtown Creek and New York City.- Skin and Bones.- Oil of Vitriol: Martin Kalbfleisch and the Manufacture of Reagent Chemicals at Newtown Creek.- Superphosphate.- Abraham Gesner and the New York Kerosene Oil Company.- Benjamin Silliman, Jr., and the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.- Charles Pratt, Henry Rogers, and Astral Oil.- Acid and copper: The 50-year Partnership of John Brown Francis Herreshoff and William Nichols.- The Standard Oil Company and New York City.- Industry, Invention, and the Americans; Newtown Creek, then and Now.
About the author
Peter Spellane is a member of the chemistry faculty at New York City College of Technology, a campus of the City University of New York (CUNY) and an adjunct member of the faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before joining CUNY, he had done postdoctoral work at the IBM T. J. Watson Laboratory and had worked as a research chemist at Akzo Nobel Chemicals in Dobbs Ferry, New York and in Arnhem, the Netherlands.
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