Well, the version I heard is that the reason I heard was that the German patent system was so week that all the German inventors went into chemistry because chemicals were harder to reverse engineer.
There is some truth to "chemistry was hard to reverse-engineer" [Petra Moser's work on world's fair patent data shows chemists across all countries avoided patents in the nineteenth century because of incentives towards secrecy]. But that can't explain why Germans dominated the chemical industry rather than the British or Americans, who faced the same technological conditions.
Importantly, German dominance kept growing after 1869 (and they continued to court talented chemists), when the periodic table made reverse-engineering feasible and chemical patenting rose everywhere.
See (from Moser, 2007): "Exhibition data show that such advances in the ability to analyze and reverse-engineer chemicals substantially increased inventors’ propensity to patent... in 1851, none of the United States’ 32 chemical innovations had been patented (Table 3 and Figure 3). By 1876, only seven years after the introduction of the periodic table, 2.2 percent of U.S. chemical exhibits at the Centennial were patented (Figure 3). The most significant increase occurred shortly thereafter: By 1893, 16 percent of U.S chemicals were protected by patents."
I have also addressed this in footnote 17, see (from Travis, 1993): "The practice of protection through secrecy that this encouraged came to an end with the passing of the 1877 Patent Law (the Reichspatentgesetz) that was uniform throughout Germany. This encouraged research and innovation through effective protection of new inventions. It later became a major incentive for the foundation of industrial research laboratories."
This was such an interesting read.
Well, the version I heard is that the reason I heard was that the German patent system was so week that all the German inventors went into chemistry because chemicals were harder to reverse engineer.
There is some truth to "chemistry was hard to reverse-engineer" [Petra Moser's work on world's fair patent data shows chemists across all countries avoided patents in the nineteenth century because of incentives towards secrecy]. But that can't explain why Germans dominated the chemical industry rather than the British or Americans, who faced the same technological conditions.
Importantly, German dominance kept growing after 1869 (and they continued to court talented chemists), when the periodic table made reverse-engineering feasible and chemical patenting rose everywhere.
See (from Moser, 2007): "Exhibition data show that such advances in the ability to analyze and reverse-engineer chemicals substantially increased inventors’ propensity to patent... in 1851, none of the United States’ 32 chemical innovations had been patented (Table 3 and Figure 3). By 1876, only seven years after the introduction of the periodic table, 2.2 percent of U.S. chemical exhibits at the Centennial were patented (Figure 3). The most significant increase occurred shortly thereafter: By 1893, 16 percent of U.S chemicals were protected by patents."
I have also addressed this in footnote 17, see (from Travis, 1993): "The practice of protection through secrecy that this encouraged came to an end with the passing of the 1877 Patent Law (the Reichspatentgesetz) that was uniform throughout Germany. This encouraged research and innovation through effective protection of new inventions. It later became a major incentive for the foundation of industrial research laboratories."