Historians of science and technology have recently recognized that the spectacular advances made during the 1920s in the manufacture of synthetic chemicals can best be understood within the context of industrial and educational developments prior to World War I. In The Rise of the American Electrochemicals Industry, 1880-1910, Martha Moore Trescott contends that the electrochemical industry provided the essential bridge between mechanical and metallurgical knowledge of the nineteenth century and chemical technology of the twentieth century.