"The International Business of Strategic Materials: Cyanide 1880-1930"

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 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.
Potassium cyanide was produced in several different ways, using atmospheric nitrogen or hydrogen cyanide in gas form. The American chemist Hamilton Castner developed a process using Ammonia gas and sodium, while German scientists extracted cyanide from molasses remnants of the beet sugar industry. The most widely used process profited from the supply of potash salts and dehydrated ferrocyanides in the Werra Valley in Hesse, yielding soluble cyanide potassium salt, packaged in cylindric steel containers.
The international landscape of actors in the history of cyanide is not well understood. German firms (principally Degussa and I.G. Farben) play a central role, but so too do German trade associations, universities, and the German state. In the United States, the Roessler & Hasslacher Company produced and distributed cyanide compounds since the 1880s; in 1930 it was acquired by DuPont. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Mines, and the Chemical Warfare Service all had an interest in shaping cyanide’s uses and production, coordinating with the Nitrogen Products Company to build a plant producing sodium cyanide. This paper presents the complex web of actors in this international history and offers a new conceptual framework for understanding the interplay of science, technology, business interests and state initiatives.