OTL the development of chemistry proceeded at a pretty smooth pace throughout the 19th century. There were individual flashes of inspiration, like the benzene ring, but overall it was the work of thousands of chemists and researchers across Western Europe.
Could it have gone faster?
I think maybe it could have. OTL, the field was disproportionately German for much of the 19th century, and until the 1850s the Germans treated it as a prestige topic -- intellectually very respectable, but of limited practical value, a bit like astronomy or particle physics today. The number of chemistry professors and students at German universities was artificially kept rather low for a couple of generations.
Anyway, for whatever reason, let's say that [handwave] starting in the 1790s the field advances about 20% faster than iOTL. That means that by the early 1890s, chemistry is at roughly the level it was OTL in 1914. You have the Haber process, bakelite, pH, chromatography, coordination chemistry, a pretty good understanding of chemical kinetics, and a whole lot of organic chemistry. Nice, yes?
However! Let us [handwave] hold all non-chemical science constant, so that *1893 is advanced /only/ in chemistry. So, radioactivity is still a curiosity, nobody realizes that "cathode rays" are electrons, there's no nuclear model of the atom. There are no such thing as X-rays, nobody knows what Brownian motion is, and there's no oil drop experiment showing the mass of the electron. I think this has to break down at some point -- you probably couldn't have 1920s level chemistry without first having the physics of the 1900s -- but I think that up to ~1914, it could work.
Okay, so. We have a late Victorian / Edwardian period that's identical to ours, except that chemistry is one generation more advanced. What happens?
Let's resist the urge to overfocus on the Haber Process and its implications. Yes, war is going to be a bit more destructive. But there weren't a lot of major wars in the 1890s and early 1900s. Hard cheese for the Boers and the Boxers, perhaps, but otherwise no big changes.
Rather, what technological knock-ons (if any) do we see? And what social changes? We have very early plastics, better dyes, much better refining of oil. We have aspirin in the 1870s instead of the 1890s, and Salvarsan -- which for 30 years was the world's great antisyphilitic -- a bit before 1890 instead of in 1907. We get vitamins around 1890 instead of in the years before WWI. We get rayon and acetate a generation sooner, which means that by 1910 they're seriously competitive with natural fibers. Also, OTL the explosion of motion picture into a mass medium had to wait until cellulose acetate film was developed in 1910. TTL it may happen a few years faster.
What else?
Doug M.
Could it have gone faster?
I think maybe it could have. OTL, the field was disproportionately German for much of the 19th century, and until the 1850s the Germans treated it as a prestige topic -- intellectually very respectable, but of limited practical value, a bit like astronomy or particle physics today. The number of chemistry professors and students at German universities was artificially kept rather low for a couple of generations.
Anyway, for whatever reason, let's say that [handwave] starting in the 1790s the field advances about 20% faster than iOTL. That means that by the early 1890s, chemistry is at roughly the level it was OTL in 1914. You have the Haber process, bakelite, pH, chromatography, coordination chemistry, a pretty good understanding of chemical kinetics, and a whole lot of organic chemistry. Nice, yes?
However! Let us [handwave] hold all non-chemical science constant, so that *1893 is advanced /only/ in chemistry. So, radioactivity is still a curiosity, nobody realizes that "cathode rays" are electrons, there's no nuclear model of the atom. There are no such thing as X-rays, nobody knows what Brownian motion is, and there's no oil drop experiment showing the mass of the electron. I think this has to break down at some point -- you probably couldn't have 1920s level chemistry without first having the physics of the 1900s -- but I think that up to ~1914, it could work.
Okay, so. We have a late Victorian / Edwardian period that's identical to ours, except that chemistry is one generation more advanced. What happens?
Let's resist the urge to overfocus on the Haber Process and its implications. Yes, war is going to be a bit more destructive. But there weren't a lot of major wars in the 1890s and early 1900s. Hard cheese for the Boers and the Boxers, perhaps, but otherwise no big changes.
Rather, what technological knock-ons (if any) do we see? And what social changes? We have very early plastics, better dyes, much better refining of oil. We have aspirin in the 1870s instead of the 1890s, and Salvarsan -- which for 30 years was the world's great antisyphilitic -- a bit before 1890 instead of in 1907. We get vitamins around 1890 instead of in the years before WWI. We get rayon and acetate a generation sooner, which means that by 1910 they're seriously competitive with natural fibers. Also, OTL the explosion of motion picture into a mass medium had to wait until cellulose acetate film was developed in 1910. TTL it may happen a few years faster.
What else?
Doug M.
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