Representing the Apparatus in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Chemical Abstracting Literature

The rise of abstracting services in the 20th century is usually associated with the explosion of original scientific research and its attendant journal literature. The abstract was a tool of information dissemination and access for increasingly expansive and international work. What is often overlooked, however, is the correlation between original research and the technologies that made these advances available. Scientific apparatuses were, however, documented from the beginning, and were also a part of the rise of abstract literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this paper I examine the development of abstracts for apparatuses and patents in the chemistry literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially in English and German language publications.