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Dyeing off: On the deaths of dyestuffs as scientific objects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2022

Mat Paskins
Mat Paskins*
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar
*
Email: M.Paskins@lse.ac.uk
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Abstract

Between the 1870s and the 1920s, the dye industry was at the center of claims about the productivity of organic chemistry. Dyestuffs were widely represented as the most complex molecules to find commercial application, and positioned at the center of nationalist projects to establish chemical industry, especially in Britain and the United States. By the later twentieth century, the complex of scientific hopes which surrounded dyestuffs had largely disappeared. In Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s terms, they had changed from “epistemic things” to, at best, “technical objects,” and lost their future-bearing status as the lynchpin of organic chemistry. Although developments in dyeing continue, dyestuffs have vacated the scientifically and culturally dynamic position that they once occupied; any restoration of this status would require a radical change in economic and material conditions. This paper considers the senses in which this change of status should be considered as the death of dyestuffs as a scientific object.

Keywords

Dyestuffstechnical objectschemical industryWilliam PerkinsIG Farben
Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 34 , Issue 2: The Death of Scientific Objects , June 2021 , pp. 297 - 311
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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