The u.s. chemicals industry, like the aircraft and automobile industries, has benefited throughout this century from scientific and technological advances originating elsewhere in the global economy. The primary contributors to fundamental knowledge of chemistry in the early decades of the century were virtually without exception Europeans. In the course of the century, however, the American scientific contribution grew, and since 1945 (in no small measure as a result of events connected with that war), the center of fundamental chemical research has been located in the United States. A comparison of trends in awards of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to citizens of the United States and the major European powers before and after 1940 is revealing in this connection. Through 1939, German scientists received fifteen out of the thirty Nobel Prizes awarded in chemistry, U.S. scientists received only three, and French and British scientists each accounted for six. Between 1940 and 1994, U.S. scientists received thirty-six of the sixty-five chemistry Prizes awarded, German scientists received eleven, British scientists received seventeen, and French scientists received one (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., pp. 740–747).

A central feature of technological change in chemicals during this century was undoubtedly the rise of the petrochemical industry, that is, the shift in organic chemicals away from a feedstock based on coal to one based on petroleum and natural gas.