Most of the successful German dye businesses were set up close to the Rhine and its tributaries, rather than in proximity to the domestic textile producers (spread throughout the country) who would be their first major customers. Because dye was a low-bulk, high-value commodity, the finished product could easily be sent anywhere by rail or carriage without adding appreciably to its cost. As the manufacturers soon found, however, making even small amounts of dye took huge quantities of fresh water, acids, alkalis, salts, fuels, pyrites, and coal tar that had to be either transported to the plant or found on-site. Fortunately, Germany’s longest navigable river network was ideal, both as a shipping route for these heavy raw materials and as a natural water source, and many of the new dye makers were canny enough to realize that any firm close to it would have an advantage over those in less geographically favorable locations. Thus, in 1863, Friedrich Bayer and Company began manufacture at the northern Rhine town of Barmen (and then Elberfeld), near Cologne, followed a few months later by Kalle and Company, which set up a plant in Biebrich, at the mouth of the Main (a Rhine tributary). Leopold and Cassella chose Frankfurt am Main for their firm, while Messrs Meister, Lucius, and Bruning opted for nearby Hoechst, and later named their company after that town.
There were some exceptions, of course, the most notable being Agfa (Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation, or Company for Aniline Production), founded by Carl Martius and Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy at Rummelsburg, near Berlin, in 1867. Martius had studied chemistry with August von Hofmann in London and, while working with a Manchester dyestuffs manufacturer, had developed his own dye, Martius yellow. Bartholdy, whose family provided much of the money to start Agfa, was the son of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. Both partners had strong emotional ties to Berlin that overrode the economic case for locating their company elsewhere.
One of the biggest dye firms was established at the small river port of Ludwigshafen. Its founder, Friedrich Engelhorn, embodied the new industry’s entrepreneurial energy more than anyone else. Born in Mannheim in July 1821, the fourth child of a local brewer, Engelhorn had little formal education. After a few brief years at grammar school, he was apprenticed to a local goldsmith and his family naturally assumed that this would eventually be his trade too. But though he set up a small workshop in Mannheim in 1846, he soon closed it again. His travels on business for his master had opened his eyes to the much wider opportunities offered by Germany’s growing industrialization and he was determined to take full advantage of them. His first large-scale enterprise, established in 1848, was a company that made and sold bottled coal gas; within three years he had expanded it into a business that operated the municipal gas-lighting works. Thus he was ideally placed, when news of Perkin’s discovery reached Germany, to switch his attention to the lucrative new world of coal tar dyes. In 1860, with two partners, Engelhorn began building his own aniline factory on a plot adjacent to the gas works. Five years later, as both competition and demand began to increase, he needed to expand once more and brought in additional investors and capital. By now he knew enough about the synthetic dye business to appreciate the high costs of shipping raw materials and the need for an adequate water supply. Unable to find an appropriate site at Mannheim, he decided to relocate to Ludwigshafen on the western bank of the Rhine, which, like many other settlements along the river, had woken up to the employment potential of the new industry and was offering dyestuff entrepreneurs generous subsidies and cheap land. In the process Engelhorn also arrived at the final shape of the firm that would later play a leading role in the IG Farben project. It was called Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik—or, as it was soon to be known, BASF.
The company flourished. Within two years of its opening the Ludwigshafen plant was making more than eighty different products. Admittedly at first most of them were barely disguised imitations of dyes produced by others—like many of the German synthetic dye pioneers, Engelhorn took advantage of his country’s chaotic patent laws—but fairly soon BASF was investing in its own research, hiring scientists, and taking part in an industrywide race to find methods of synthesizing the two most commercially successful natural dyes on the market, madder red and indigo blue. While the various aniline dyes that had followed the invention of mauveine in 1856 were considered superior in terms of the purity and brightness of their color tone, many of them still looked artificial compared with natural dyes. A chemical process that could accurately replicate, or even improve upon, the more genuine tones of these traditional products would be worth a fortune.
BASF struck lucky with madder red. In 1868 two Berlin research students, Carl Graebe and Carl Liebemann, having worked out a complex procedure for synthesizing the dye that used the chemical bromine as a catalyst, began hawking it around to the major manufacturers. Most turned it down because bromine was so expensive it rendered the process unviable for industrial production. But BASF’s Engelhorn passed the two young scientists and their ideas on to his firm’s newly appointed technical director, Heinrich Caro, who quickly came up with a better solution, substituting cheap sulphuric acid for bromine. The resulting dye, called alizarin red, was such an improvement over the expensive traditional product—with more nuances of shade and greater speed and ease of application—that it would destroy the ancient madder industry in less than a decade. Just as important, as far as BASF was concerned, alizarin red was hugely profitable. Because the company was able to patent the process in the United States, France, and England (where, ironically, it would enter into a joint production agreement with Perkin and Sons), the discovery helped secure the company’s long-term financial future.
But the success of alizarin red exposed as never before the problems with Germany’s patent procedures. Although the rules were being rationalized as unification approached, different patent laws still applied in different German states and the regulations were full of exploitable loopholes. These ambiguities allowed rival firms to copy one another’s best ideas and led to many protracted and essentially irresolvable arguments about the provenance and timing of successful inventions. The Hoechst firm, for example, also rejected the expensive bromine process for synthesizing madder and, unbeknownst to BASF, had been working on its own solution to the problem. Apparently Hoechst scientists had independently arrived at the idea of using sulphuric acid as a cheaper catalyst, and though there was some heated debate between the parties about exactly when and how this had happened, BASF could not prevent Hoechst from climbing on board the alizarin gravy train.
Others followed suit, most notably Friedrich Bayer and Company of Elberfeld, Germany’s oldest synthetic dye business. After a typically optimistic start in the industry, the firm had seen its profitability badly hit by aggressive competition. The invention of alizarin was a shot in the arm. While Bayer was not as obviously successful as BASF or Hoechst, it was just as able to skip through loopholes in the patent laws when a good idea came along. Heinrich Caro’s inspired idea of using sulphuric acid as a catalyst was well publicized and relatively easy to replicate. By hanging on to the marketing coattails of its bigger neighbors and feverishly making as much of the new dye as its small works could manage, Bayer was able to turn its fortunes around. The profits were not yet huge, but the money was sufficient to ensure the firm’s survival and allow it to begin hiring its own academic researchers—something its founders, Friedrich Bayer and Johann Weskott, had belatedly realized was essential to continued success.
Of course, every German synthetic dye company faced similarly intense competitive challenges and many failed to respond. In and around Bayer’s base at Elberfeld a dozen promising start-up businesses collapsed into bankruptcy within the first decade of their existence. But such pressures energized the survivors, making them unusually sensitive to consumer demand and urging them on in their search for new products and better ways to make them. This, in turn, made them stronger, leaner, and more aggressive—particularly relative to their foreign rivals. Less nimble chemical companies operating in Europe’s older i
ndustrial economies (where investors had a wider and less risky range of investment opportunities) found it harder to raise capital and often struggled to keep up with the scientific ingenuity and pace of developments in Germany. Eventually the strain began to tell. By the early 1870s, companies like BASF, Hoechst, and even struggling Bayer had snatched control of the industry away from England and France and were racing away into an unassailable lead.
Almost certainly their growing confidence was influenced by the successes that Germany was enjoying in other arenas. In 1870, helped by the sophisticated new artillery of the Krupp steel and armaments business, spike-helmeted Prussian forces had demolished the army of Napoleon III at Sedan, bombarded a briefly republican Paris into submission, and forced a successful conclusion to the Franco-Prussian War. The victory gave the final impetus, if any was needed, to the establishment of the Second Reich in 1871, joining together four kingdoms, five grand duchies, seven principalities, three free cities, and the imperial domain of Alsace-Lorraine under a single emperor, the Hohenzollern Kaiser Wilhelm I, and his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Commerce blossomed briefly in the aftermath, creating more jobs, more demand, and more capital, and although there was a brief readjusting slump in 1873, the implications of Ein Volk, ein Kaiser, ein Reich were clear: a united and economically vibrant Germany was now a force to be reckoned with.
For those running the young country’s newest and most innovative industry, the exhilarating sense of national pride fostered by these events undoubtedly contributed to their willingness to take risks their more cautious foreign rivals shied away from. Their audaciousness would prove crucial to the industry’s development. In just over a decade, Germany’s synthetic dye makers had come from nowhere to command the field. The stage was now set for their successors, men with the foresight and scientific acumen to recognize that dyestuffs were only the beginning, that out of the same set of basic chemical compounds could come other, more remarkable discoveries of a kind unimaginable to earlier generations.
* * *
FOR A MAN destined to be described one day as “the world’s greatest industrialist,” Friedrich Carl Duisberg came from decidedly humble origins. His father, a thrifty, conservative man, made dressmakers’ ribbons on a pair of looms in the family home on Heckinghauser Strasse in Barmen, but the profits from this business were so modest that his wife, Wilhelmine, had to sell milk to supplement their income. From the moment he was born on September 29, 1861, young Carl’s life was therefore framed in simple austerity. He attended the local schools, dutifully did his chores, and generally kept his head down, glumly resigned to a future that seemed set to revolve around cheap braid and dairy products. But then in his early teens he took his first science lessons at secondary school and experienced an epiphany. From that moment he knew his future lay elsewhere: he was going to be a chemist.
Duisberg Senior thought otherwise. Determined that his son should leave school at fourteen and join the family business, he insisted that expensive and nonsensical notions about science be set aside. Carl argued with him again and again but could not change his mind. Fortunately, Wilhelmine had more imagination than her husband. She knew little about chemistry or even where Carl’s interest might lead (she had vague ideas about a career in pharmacy) but was bright enough to appreciate that he would have to continue with his education if he was to better himself. So she took his side and after many furious rows managed to coax her stubborn spouse into agreement.
Aware that he was on a very short leash, Carl applied himself with all the fervor and obsessive attention to detail that would mark much of his subsequent career. He took his high school diploma at the age of sixteen, rushed through a foundational chemistry course at Elberfeld technical college, and then enrolled at Göttingen University for a year. Into those twelve months he managed to pack as much study as another student would in three years and completed his thesis in record time. It was only then he found out that he was ineligible for a degree because he didn’t have the requisite Latin to pass a mandatory test. In a blazing fury he transferred to a college at Jena, coming under the wing of Anton Geuther, a leading academic chemist of the day, who insisted that his hyperactive student slow down a little and take the time to learn basic laboratory technique. Although he was desperately impatient to get on, Duisberg took the delay in his stride and earned his doctorate on June 14, 1882, at the age of twenty.
For all his qualifications he was still financially dependent on his obdurate father and Carl knew he had to find employment. He began scouring the scientific journals and trade magazines for advertisements and sent application letters to every academic institute and chemically related business he could think of. But there were far more chemistry graduates coming out of German universities than there were jobs for them and all but one of his approaches failed. It was a sign of his utter frustration that when he was offered work as a clerical assistant in the Food Inspection Office in Krefeld (a more dead-end job would have been hard to find), he thought seriously of taking it. It was then his old tutor, Anton Geuther, took pity on him and said he could help out in the college laboratory in return for a bed in an attic room and a little spare cash for his meals. The idea was that he would stay until he found a proper job and keep his chemistry skills fresh, but after a few months Duisberg had had enough. He had convinced himself that his lack of military service might be putting potential employers off. After a furious row with his mentor, who believed he was wasting his time, he stormed out and signed up for a year as a volunteer with the First Bavarian Regiment. Twelve unhappy months later, in September 1883, he was back at Heckinghauser Strasse, unemployed once more. He closed his ears to his father’s protestations and hurled himself into one last frenzied round of applications. And then finally—long after someone less driven would have given up—his luck turned. A local dye company asked to see him.
Friedrich Bayer and Company’s success with alizarin red had carried it through more than a decade but now the dye’s popularity had largely run its course, competition was even more brutal than before, and industry experts were openly speculating about the company’s survival. By 1881, Friedrich Bayer and Johann Weskott had died and Carl Rumpff, Bayer’s son-in-law, had picked up the reins. His first task after his father-in-law’s death was to sell the firm’s stock to the public to raise some much-needed capital—in the process renaming it Farbenfabriken vormals Friedrich Bayer & Co. (the Dye Company formerly known as Friedrich Bayer and Company). But Rumpff knew that the only real answer to the business’s problems lay in attracting top scientific talent. There may well have been a surplus of bright chemistry graduates on the German job market but there were a fair number of indifferent ones, too, and for firms without a strong scientific tradition it was hard to spot or attract the right people. So Rumpff tried a new approach. He had the idea of sponsoring three young chemistry graduates through a postdoctoral fellowship at Strasbourg University for a year, getting them to conduct research into possible new dye combinations. At the end of that time, if they had proved themselves, they would join the company as employees and bring the results of their work with them.
As word of his intentions got around, he was inundated with letters from hopeful applicants. One of them was from a local man, a twenty-two-year-old Barmen chemist with an impressive set of academic qualifications who had recently returned from military service. He had actually applied to Bayer once before and had been turned down.* Please could he be reconsidered? Moved by the note of desperation in this appeal, Rumpff asked Duisberg to come and see him—and then offered him the fellowship.
Uncharacteristically, having worked so long and hard for the opportunity, the young chemist agonized about whether to take it. The role was only probationary, and the pay was pitiful—about 150 marks a month. And, on his return from Strasbourg (if he was lucky enough to be offered a full contract), the low salary would force him to live with his parents again, something he’d been hoping to avoid. But after a few days’ reflection he reali
zed he had little choice. At least the fellowship would give him a start in an industry where there was much interesting chemistry to be done.
He must have balked a little more when given his first research assignment—to find a synthetic equivalent of indigo, the hugely popular natural dye that had tantalized chemists for decades. Every attempt to reproduce it artificially, at least in a form that could be produced in bulk, had failed. Some scientists even joked that it was impossible, a kind of dyers’ grail that was never meant to be found. Nevertheless, perhaps reasoning that it was a test of his character, Bayer’s latest recruit set about the task with a will. To no one’s particular astonishment the great prize eluded him, too, but something about his determination must have impressed his new bosses. On September 29, 1884, his twenty-third birthday, Duisberg was delighted to be able to tell his father that he had been given a proper job and that his salary had been bumped up to a relatively handsome 2,100 marks a year. Shortly thereafter, he began courting Carl Rumpff’s niece and for a time it must have seemed as though his life were complete.
But Duisberg soon realized that to succeed in the cutthroat world of the German synthetic dye industry a chemist needed more than just scientific acumen, a capacity for hard work, and promising connections. He had to have a good grasp of the arcane rules and patent procedures of his trade—and a ruthless business streak as well. Shortly after he began work at Elberfeld (his first laboratory was in a tiny room behind the dye department’s toilets), he had an opportunity to see if he was made of the right stuff. He was asked to reproduce a popular new scarlet dye known as Congo red. Another Bayer scientist had actually found this color a year earlier but in defiance of his contract he had skipped the company, quietly patented the discovery himself, and sold the rights to a competitor. Infuriated as much by the man’s disloyalty as by the lost opportunity for profits, Rumpff tasked Duisberg with finding an alternative. One of the many peculiarities in German patent law was that a company was allowed to copy a rival’s product if it could come up with a different way of making it. Inventors knew this, of course, and would do everything in their power to preempt future imitators by patenting as many different permutations of their production process as they could think of. But occasionally they would miss something and competitors would pounce. As might be imagined, the courts would usually then be asked to resolve the matter and so ideally any potential imitators would try to find a manufacturing method that was as demonstrably unlike the original as possible. If they managed to do so and were able to convince the authorities of the novelty of their process, the rewards could be enormous. If not, the penalties and legal costs could be crippling.
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