Back in the 1920s, the newly established discipline of chemical engineering set about the business of designing more efficient processing technologies in order to satisfy the rapidly expanding demand for gasoline. This discipline of chemical engineering became, in effect, a general purpose technology.
Of course, chemical engineering did not become a general purpose technology entirely through its own actions. Chemical engineering became a GPT, in large measure, when research in polymer chemistry laid the scientific basis for a whole range of new products that could best be produced from petroleum feedstocks. The scientific basis for these new products that were to dominate the petrochemical industry—plastics, synthetic fiber, synthetic rubber - was also, like chemical engineering, a product of the interwar years. But these petrochemical industries only acquired major economic significance in the years after World War II. (Ascribe Higher Education News Service, 2002).
This chronology points to an interesting, serendipitous feature of chemical engineering as a general purpose technology. The GPT capability did not emerge in response to the prior existence of a large, heterogeneous body of downstream users of the technology, whose existence generated strong economic incentives to upstream suppliers of complementary inputs. Complementarities were, indeed, of central importance. However, the story of chemical engineering as a GPT is one in which the general purpose capability was developed primarily in response to the needs of one sector: petroleum. Only later on did petroleum come to constitute the main feedstock for an expanding multiplicity of industrial users. Thus, developments upstream in the interwar years clearly preceded the extensive developments downstream that eventually transformed chemical engineering into a GPT. The story is one of large unanticipated benefits in which a capability originally developed for one limited set of needs turned out to satisfy a much larger set of needs—needs that only developed later.....................
