Volume 41, Issue 3

We embarked on the adventure of researching IUPAC’s history a few years ago, inspired by the looming IUPAC 100 anniversary in 2019 and the desire of the French National Committee to host that year’s Congress and General Assembly in Paris. The proposal to host the fiftieth IUPAC General Assembly and forty-seventh Congress in Paris was received and approved by IUPAC Council during its assembly in 2013. Soon after, Jean-Pierre Vairon, a member of the organizing committee of the IUPAC 2019 Congress, contacted Danielle Fauque, and together we started to think about special symposia devoted to the history of IUPAC. At the Congress in 2015 in Busan, Korea, the idea was met with enthusiasm and interest from Natalia Tarasova, then president of the Union, and the project of this special issue was formed with Fabienne Meyers, Chemistry International editor. We also met with Christopher Brett later that year to speak about this project.

In April 1919, delegates of five allied nations gathered in Paris, at the initiative of the Société de Chimie Industrielle (SCI-F) and the French Federation of Chemical Associations (FNAC) to decide on the creation of an interallied confederation for pure and applied chemistry. The delegates were following up on a proposal made by the Interallied Conference of Scientific Academies that had met in London and Paris in 1918. Each country was asked to create a national body in each discipline, and these entities would be united into a Union, at first an interallied then international union when the wounds of war healed. The whole structure was to be headed by an International Research Council (IRC) [1].

IUPAC was a product of a restructuring of world science that took place immediately after the Great War. In a series of three conferences in London, Paris, and Brussels between October 1918 and July 1919, delegations from twelve allied nations established a new body, the International Research Council (IRC), that was to control international relations in science through subsidiary unions for the various scientific disciplines until a review of the statutes planned for 1931. Four of these unions were established at the Brussels conference, among them IUPAC.

In 1925, the Dutchman Ernst Julius Cohen (1869-1944) was unanimously elected president of the IUPAC (in absence) at the annual meeting in Bucharest. Although quite well known as able linguist, physical chemist and student of J.H. van ‘t Hoff, no one could have suspected this turn of events three years earlier. On 21 June 1922, Cohen had organized an informal, purely scientific meeting in Utrecht— the International Chemical Reunion Utrecht (ICRU)—to restore friendly relations between scientists from all previously warring nations. However, Belgian and French chemists, headed by Jean Timmermans and Charles Moureu, boycotted this meeting as they had not yet forgotten the atrocities of the ‘chemists’ war.’ At the subsequent IUPAC meeting in Lyon (27 June - 1 July), Cohen, together with Hugo Kruyt, had to fend off harsh criticisms by their international colleagues [1].

During a search of photographs and documentation on the Belgian photographer Benjamin Couprie, who took the well-known pictures of the Solvay Conferences during the first half of the twentieth century, Santiago Alvarez [1] came across an image in “La Digithèque des Bibliothèques de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles” with the title “Réception de l’Union Internationale de Chimie Pure et Appliquée, photographie de groupe” (Figure 1) [2]. It is a high-resolution copy of a very sharp photograph of a group of 86 people. On the frame of that photo one can read two inscriptions noted in pencil above and below the photograph, respectively: “Union Internationale de la Chimie pure et appliquée,” and “Reception au chateau de La Hulpe le 29 Juin 1921.” Moreover, just under the photograph there are two inscriptions in smaller letters: “Bruxelles 1913,“ on the left, and the signature of “Benj. Couprie” on the right, both in the same handwriting. Two questions arise: (1) Which is the correct date for that photograph? (2) Who are the persons that appear in the photo?

East Asia occupies a substantial position in IUPAC today. The incumbent president for 2018-2019, Qi-Feng Zhou, is from China/Beijing, and three out of ten elected members of the Bureau are from East Asia: Mei-Hung Chiu from China/Taipei, Kew-Ho Lee from Korea, and Ken Sakai from Japan. This region is thus well-represented in the IUPAC leadership. However, this is not how this now global institution looked in the past. Its first president from East Asia was Saburo Nagakura (b. 1920) from Japan who assumed this office from 1981-1982, more than 60 years after the IUPAC was established in 1919. He was followed by Jung-Il Jing from Korea (2008-2009), Kazuyuki Tatsumi (2012-2013) from Japan, and Zhou. In terms of national adhering organizations (NAOs), Japan was the first East Asian nation admitted to IUPAC in 1921, but we had to wait until the late 1970s for all other national chemical communities in East Asia to be officially admitted to the IUPAC: The Chemical Society Located in Taipei in 1959, the Korean Chemical Society in 1963, and the Chinese Chemical Society in 1979. East Asia’s position in the IUPAC is the outcome of a rather long historical process.

The caricature published in Chemistry and Industry, 2 August 1947, is Fred May’s impressions of the luncheon offered to the XI th International Congress of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the May Fair Hotel, London, 18 July 1947 by the Society of Chemical Industry to distinguished chemists on the occasion of its centennial [1]. Fred May (1891-1976) was a caricaturist and painter, who sent his first cartoons from the front in 1917. May insists on the strenuous time the toastmaster had during the dinner that welcomed many prominent British and international figures in the chemical sciences and industry. Dr Leslie H. Lampitt, president of the SCI, chairman of the Congress and treasurer of IUPAC (1947-1957) “expressed that welcome in a very homely way” [1]. William Hulme Lever, 2 nd Viscount Leverhulme (1888-1949), cofounder of Unilever, a past president of the SCI, acted as president of the Congress [2].

The League of Nations’ failure to ensure global peace by solving conflicts through diplomatic and peaceful means prompted Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to discuss the creation of a more efficient international organization as soon as the Second World War erupted. These preliminary efforts led to the signing of the Charter of the United Nations (UN) in San Francisco in 1945. In January 1946, the first general UN assembly took place, along with the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council. The latter created several international bodies, among them UNESCO. At first, UNESCO seemed to be the continuation of the International Institute for the Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) coupled with the International Commission for the Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), but was actually based on new rules [1].

In 1907, a 28-year-old Norwegian pharmacist-chemist arrived in Paris to work with Marie Curie at the Radium Institute. Like many women at the time, Ellen Gleditsch was attracted to the newly discovered phenomenon of radioactivity and wished take part in exciting scientific endeavour. Working with the Nobel Laureate Marie Curie was a unique opportunity for the ambitious young chemist, whose skills in mineral analyses led to her being accepted into the otherwise fully staffed laboratory. By all accounts, Ellen Gleditsch appears to have been one of the first women associated with IUPAC. In 1921 she was the Norwegian representative of the committee working on the Tables Annuelles de Constantes et Données Numériques de Chimie, de Physique et de Technologie [1], published under the auspices of IUPAC with the agreement of the International Research Council. In the following year she was a member of the Commission on Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry during its meeting in Lyon [2]. In 1947 Gleditsch became a full member of the Joint Commission of Standards and Units of Radioactivity, joining her friends Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie in this capacity, and all three continued to be members until the Commission’s dissolution in 1955 [3]. IUPAC was the mother union of this Joint Commission, and directly linked with International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU).

To chemists and chemical educators, there were two important events in the ‘60s and ‘70s. First, in 1961, the agreement between physicists and chemists on the choice of carbon 12 as unique element of reference in the atomic weights table and then in 1971, the definition of mole as the seventh unit of the international system [1]. In both of these issues the Union played its role as expert to the fullest, and established solid grounds for a common language of chemistry across the world. This role is also extended to other matters at a time marked by social changes. Technological progress improved quality of life like never before and the space conquest that opened new horizons, both scientific and technological, to explore. All the while, despite the Cold War, international and interdisciplinary projects are established, and new international organizations, such as UNESCO, appear to cope with the new challenges. Alongside these organizations, the longstanding ICSU and the Union adapt themselves.

Victor Nikolaevitch Kondratiev was elected a member of the Bureau, the Executive Committee and the Editorial Board of IUPAC at the beginning of the XXI st International Conference in Montreal, in August of 1961. He succeeded Boris A. Kazanski (1891-1973) who had resigned. At this time the Academy of Science of USSR was the national adhering body in IUPAC since 1930.

In the second half of the Twentieth Century, the chemical and molecular sciences experienced a deep transformation with regard to the types of research instruments used, and the associated methods involved. Historians have coined this development the Instrumental Revolution, and even described it as the Second Chemical Revolution [1]. With the latter notion, they referred to the First Chemical Revolution of the late eighteenth century, when Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his allies transformed chemistry’s theoretical framework along with its nomenclature, creating modern chemistry. The “second” chemical revolution of the twentieth century had an equally deep impact on chemistry’s theoretical base, linking chemistry to quantum physics, and expanding its range into the life sciences and technologies, the material sciences, and engineering. However, the related changes in terminology and nomenclature have largely escaped the historian’s attention, and this might explain why IUPAC’s role in the Instrumental Revolution has not been investigated in any detail. In the following, I will first briefly describe the Instrumental Revolution, and its main impact on chemistry and related fields, before sketching IUPAC’s role in facilitating and enhancing it [2].

The systematic nomenclature of inorganic chemistry is much older than IUPAC itself, and so is the history of the Commission for the Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry (CNIC). The nomenclature developed as new chemistry originated and grew at the beginning of the 19 th century, when the chemical community came to recognise the need for international agreement on the formalisms to be used, to enable practitioners from different countries to understand communications between them. In that period such communications were only written or printed. Since CNIC produced the first of its IUPAC Red Books on the nomenclature of inorganic chemistry in 1957, the Red Books themselves have been continuously rewritten and expanded as the science of chemistry has grown, and they represent a collaborative production, both in the number of people involved and the time-frame they occupy, which is possibly unique in modern science.

It was once not uncommon for elements to have more than one name. Tungsten and wolfram. Columbium and niobium. Beryllium and glucinum. The multiple names were generally due to language differences, personal preference, and nationality. These different names were ultimately harmonized into a single set of names after World War II with the development of a standardized nomenclature for inorganic chemistry (IUPAC’s famous Red Book). At the same time, new elements ceased be to found in naturally-occurring substances. Rather, new elements began to be created in accelerators. The advent of synthesized elements raised new questions regarding the discovery of new elements. It also created a new set of challenges for their naming, one of the tasks of the old Commission on Nomenclature for Inorganic Chemistry (CNIC) of IUPAC. As we will see, to face these challenges the CNIC relied successively on the adjudication of the US National Research Council (US NRC) for the naming of promethium in 1948, and then on an ongoing partnership with the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).

The chemist’s tongue is sticking out and his eyes are upturned in concentration. Spirals circle above his head; the chemist is confused. His body twisted into a knot, he slowly backpedals, one finger pointing straight up, the other pointing backwards. To his side, a chart displays a maze, or perhaps a diagram of a complex logic circuit, illustrating an arcane web of decisions and procedures. A dot sits at rest within the diagram, marking the stymied chemist’s progress through this maze. It is annotated with a comment: “You are here. Why?”

The mole is the unit of amount of substance in the International System of Units (SI). The amount of substance of a system is a measure of the number of specified elementary entities defining that system. As a matter of fact, the mole is the sole unit currently in use for amount of substance.

IUPAC was founded in 1919, but it was in 1911 that the International Association of Chemical Societies, IACS, considered as the precursor of the Union, was created. A look at the picture of the third meeting of IACS, held in 1913 in Brussels [1], makes obvious the absence of any woman—and the quasi-absence of any man without a beard or a moustache! A look at the population of women in IUPAC fifty years later showed the same situation, although by then beards and moustaches had lost ground. A thorough examination of the composition of IUPAC’s Divisions and Committees reveals a few women members before 1975 [2]. In the 70s and early 80s, the presence of a few women become noticeable. The names of these women, with their position and years of membership are tabulated here in chronological order by their initial membership on Divisions or Committees. Until 1990, all women are included in the table. From 1990 to 2010, only those with Titular Member (TM) status are listed, and after 2010 only those involved in the Bureau (BU), either as division president (DP), standing committee chair (SCC), or elected member (EM) and officer.

As IUPAC begins celebrating its centennial this year, it seems appropriate to remind everyone that the historical record of IUPAC is preserved in the archives of the Science History Institute’s Othmer Library. For the rich history of IUPAC to be told correctly and effectively, the archive is absolutely critical. And the existing archive speaks to the importance of the Institute’s desire to continue to build the collection, filling in gaps that currently exist and adding future materials so that we can craft an even better history when IUPAC celebrates in bicentennial in 2119.

To many non-native, or non-American, English speakers, the word “commencement” sounds like a strange choice to designate the end of a university curriculum. But then, all speeches and celebration talks given on commencement day focus on the future, and what students must take away from the years leading to graduation in a world full of opportunities, challenges, and unknowns. The same applies to our work on the history of IUPAC. It was started in the wake of the IUPAC 100 th anniversary, and it will be mentioned among other presentations during the IUPAC centenary celebrations, but for both IUPAC and the writing of its history, 2019 does not mark an end but a beginning, a step on a path full of challenges and opportunities.