Abstract
WHATEVER the political changes resulting from the present European struggle may be, it is certain that the industrial and economic changes will be of an equally striking and revolutionary character. Those of us who can remember Europe as it was before the war of 1870 and now look back upon the forty-five years which have elapsed since that fateful conflict, cannot fail to realise that the transfer of Alsace and Lorraine from France to Germany was an event of vanishing importance compared with the gigantic disturbance which has been brought about in Europe and throughout the world by the unprecedented industrial expansion of Germany which has taken place during the same period. Some idea of the stupendous magnitude of this rapid development in the matter of chemical industries may be gathered from the figures cited by Prof. Percy Frankland in a lecture recently delivered before the Society of Chemical Industry, and of which an abstract was published in our last issue. The magnitude and variety of the German chemical industries are surpassed in wonder only by the rapidity with which they have developed from the very small dimensions which they possessed prior to the war of 1870. Still more remarkable, however, is the fact that a similar investigation of many other activities, such as the textile, mining, metallurgical, electrical, agricultural, and shipping industries, would reveal developments almost equally startling.
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Science and Industry . Nature 95, 57–59 (1915). https://doi.org/10.1038/095057a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/095057a0