Roscoe’s Engagement with Industry

Abstract Having come to appreciate through his work with Robert Bunsen how collaboration between university chemists and industrial firms led to improved working of industrial processes and to economic progress, Roscoe drew on his remarkable network of friends and associates to engage in consultancy work (principally on vanadium and air and water analysis), assist the Alkali Inspectorate as an independent advisor (working with his friend Alfred Fletcher), act as a Commissioner for Royal Commission on Noxious Vapours (1876), take a leading role in the formation of the Society of Chemical Industry (and its first President in 1881), and become a director of the Castner–Kellner Alkali Company (1895). Roscoe witnessed the collaboration between German researchers and dye makers in Manchester that included the German chemist Robert Caro, but was unable to avoid a conflict with the Manchester dye maker Ivan Levinstein over the nature and level of academic support.