Humans have found or made 50 million different chemicals here on Earth, the vast majority over the last few decades.

At least, that's how many unique chemicals are now registered in a database maintained by the American Chemical Society as of yesterday. The announcement underscores the tremendous growth of the global chemicals industry after World War II.

“A novel substance is either isolated or synthesized every 2.6 seconds on the average during the past 12 months, day and night, seven days a week in the world," said Dr. Hideaki Chihara, Ph.D. chemist and former president of Japan Association for International Chemical Information.

The rate new chemicals are being produced and isolated is astounding. It took 33 years to get the first 10 million chemicals registered and a mere nine months to get the last 10 million chemicals into the database. In part, the acceleration is due to better tracking by the American Chemical Society, but laboratories around the world are also just producing (and patenting) a tremendous amount of molecules.

And while the Chemical Abstracts Service registry is the most comprehensive list around, there are undoubtedly more proprietary substances that remain off the books.

Image: flickr/Chemical Heritage Foundation.

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