The German Genius

Hochschule. By then he had been elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, in 1874, a rare—and perhaps unique—honor for someone who did not have a PhD.
    T HE C OLOR R EVOLUTION
     
    In 1862, Queen Victoria attended the London International Exhibition in South Kensington wearing a vivid mauve gown. This choice, says Diarmuid Jeffreys, was more significant than might appear because one of the main exhibits at the show was a massive pillar of purple dye. “Sitting next to the pile was its inventor/discoverer, William Perkin.” 7
    Perkin, like Siemens, had always been interested in engineering and in chemistry. He had been a student at the new Royal College of Chemistry, established as a consequence of the growing awareness in Britain that its science was lagging behind that of its continental competitors, Germany in particular. Among the benefactors of the college was Prince Albert, the prince consort, who, as noted in an earlier chapter, had persuaded the celebrated German scientist, August Wilhelm von Hofmann (then only twenty-eight) to be the first professor at the Royal College. Perkin started as one of his students, but by 1856 had been appointed Hofmann’s personal laboratory assistant. 8
    Hofmann began this collaboration by suggesting that Perkin try to synthesize quinine. Virtually every professional chemist had been trying to do this for years, as a synthetic cure for malaria (vital in an age of colonial expansion). Like everyone else, Perkin failed but then he toyed with a substance called allyl toluidine and, “by one of those flukes of science,” the aniline Perkin used contained impurities. Entirely unexpectedly, he found that the black sludge left behind, when washed with water, turned a vivid purple.
    Throughout history until that point, people had little choice in the colors available for their clothes. Derived from animal, vegetable, and mineral substances, the “earth colors”—reds, browns and yellows—were by far the most common, and the cheapest. 9 As a result, the rarer colors were much sought after, blue and purple in particular. On top of that, under the industrial revolution, millions of yards of cotton fabric were being produced by the new machine-driven textile mills of Lancashire and elsewhere, and opportunities for cheaper and more interesting colors were opening up. 10 Perkin therefore took out a patent on his purple dye and set up a factory in London. He called his new color mauveine , or mauve, and it quickly became popular, helped by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, who wore it because she thought it matched her eyes. By the time he was thirty-five, Perkin was rich.
    The Germans, through Hofmann, had had a hand in Perkin’s education. Now they saw their chance to take a dividend. With abundant coal in the Ruhr and more chemists than anywhere else, coal-dye companies sprang up all over Germany. A plethora of new synthetic dyes was rapidly discovered and in no time German dye companies led the world. 11 Coal-tar dyes expanded so quickly that, within a few decades of the end of the century, they had virtually eliminated natural colors from the market. Once the colors became standardized (not easy with natural products), a stability was introduced to the market that hadn’t been there before.
    The new color industry also owed its life to the simultaneous development of two other industrial/scientific innovations. One was the large-scale manufacture of illuminating gas, a by-product of which was tar. Second was the rise of systematic organic chemistry in the laboratory (see Chapter 13). The starting point occurred in 1843 when Justus von Liebig instructed one of his assistants to analyze some light coal oil sent to him by a former student, Ernest Sell. 12 The assistant chosen by von Liebig to analyze Sell’s oil was Hofmann, who had just secured his doctorate at Giessen. Hofmann’s analysis revealed that coal-tar oil contained aniline and benzene, two substances that would themselves go on to become important industrially and commercially. Hofmann himself was initially more interested in teaching and research, and his interest in dyes grew only slowly. Because he was more interested in theory, it was the composition of dyes that mattered to him, and so his investigation of fuchsin, produced by the French and named after the fuchsia flower because its color was similar, was more systematic than anyone else’s. Giving the substance the scientific name of