A COMPANY IN TRANSITION

BASF at the Paris World Exposition of 1900

In 1899 the BASF accepted the invitation of the German government to participate in a collective exhibition of the German chemical industry at the Paris World Exposition of 1900. The company had been reluctant to join the others, in that there would not be enough space for an individual company display, and within the collective exhibition individual companies could not be identified. How would the company find a way to bring attention to its unique attributes?

The enforced collectivity and anonymity of the German chemical industry's display at Paris extended to the official catalog, which did not contain an index connecting individual products displayed to the companies that produced them. Yet the anonymity that might have troubled a smaller competitor could hardly have been a serious disadvantage for BASF, then the world's largest manufacturer of artificial dyes. As reported by the editor of Die chemische Industrie, Dr. Otto N. Witt, BASF played a central role in two main sections of the display. Section I featured the products of the heavy chemical industry, among them the “epoch making advance” embodied in BASF's contact process for the direct production of concentrated sulfuric acid, which annually absorbed some 80,000 tons of pyrites. The company's role in Section VI, the artificial dyes, was even more central.