"Ambitious and Glory Hunting . . . Impractical and Fantastic": Heinrich Caro at BASF

What makes a successful and prolific inventor? It is a question that many of us ask as we explore the careers of those who have made their names or their fortunes by invention. In the field of technology, publications, patents, and memoirs are useful guides to how, why, and when. Sometimes surviving personal journals, diaries, and correspondence provide meaningful insights into key periods of an inventor's career. Even self-congratulatory accounts have their place in the repertoire of historical evidence. When source material is thin on the ground, or fragmented, other approaches to verisimilitude must be sought out. Reports of litigation over patents, for example, despite their highly partisan nature, offer ways to measure accomplishment. In the case of the German chemist Heinrich Caro (18341910), arguably the pioneer of modern science-based chemical invention, all these sources are available in abundance, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to explore his most creative years, the 1870s and early 1880s, at least from Caro's own perspective. It was a remarkably fertile period, when, as development chemist and then research director at the Badische Anilinund Soda-Fabrik (BASF) of Ludwigshafen, Caro became the most important inventor of synthetic dyestuffs in the 19th century.'