Setting the Standard: Fertilizers, State Chemists, and Early National Commercial Regulation,

Abstract

In 1870 the noted New England chemist, James Robinson Nichols, editor and proprietor of the prestigious Boston Journal of Chemistry, attacked the Grafton Mineral Fertilizer Company. Nichols's motives for investigating the New Hampshire based firm remain unclear. He certainly should not have suspected the company of selling an adulterated product; unlike many artificial manures, the Grafton material had quickly won farmers' approval and seemed to boost crop production dramatically. In any case, Nichols chose to include the manure in a series of analyses of commercial fertilizers commissioned by the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture. From his determinations, he pronounced the Grafton concoction worthless, or nearly so. Nichols's analysis stung the company and it tried to strike back. During the next year, it secured testimonials from fifty prominent New Hampshirites, most of whom were farmers. Each testified either to the concern's respectability or to individual success with its product. The company then circulated handbills of these statements. When the circulars reached Nichols, he used his journal to spring a devastating counteroffensive. If fifty men deliberately sign a document, he snipped, that gold can be manufactured from lead, or that plants assimilate and thrive on dolomite rock powder, those assertions would continue to remain untrue. The principle was the same in the Grafton case. Farmers had the option of believing the statements of fifty men, and declaring false and erroneous all that science and research have taught us during the last century... or [of] doubting the verity of the

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