Abstract

"Produce and Contain: the Growth and the Toxicity of Cyanide Production 1880-1930"

Israel García Solares, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (isgarcia@colmex.mx), Ted Beatty, University of Notre Dame (ebeatty@nd.edu)

Between 1870 and 1920, the production and use of the chemical compound cyanide exploded dramatically. Earlier, cyanide had constituted the central component of the world’s first synthetic dye, Prussian blue. By the 1920s, cyanide compounds constituted a strategic material in mining and agriculture, with widespread use in mineral refining and as a general fumigant (and in the 1930s, hydrogen cyanide became infamous as Zyklon-B in Nazi gas chambers). Technological developments led by scientists in Europe and the United States expanded methods of production and potential uses of cyanide compounds in a short period of time, and an international cartel was formed and stable.
The high toxicity of cyanide was well known during the 19th century and in some uses of cyanide the toxicity was an integral part of the technology, but, the inputs to cyanide production were not highly poisonous themselves. As demand grew, technologies of production of cyanide diversified: potassium salts, ammonia, sodium, molasses from the beet sugar industry were components in different methods of production in the early 20th century. In other words, cyanide producing companies had to first create toxicity, then contain it, then liberate it into the environment and, in some cases, contain it again.
This paper explores that chain of production of toxicity, the technological answers that it entangled, and the different actors that intervened in it, from international cartels to mining companies, from worker’s organizations to state regulators, and from users to victims. The complex web of actors in this international history offers new links between technological, business and environmental history.