In 1863, Hugo Muller at De la Rue expressed an interest in using mauve colour lakes as a replacement for its unreliable cochineal dyes. Muller had worked with Justus von Liebig in Germany, and had been recommended to De la Rue by August Hofmann. It is unknown why Muller chose to use Caro rather than Perkin for his supply of mauve (perhaps it was merely due to their shared language), but he was clearly pleased with the results. ‘These colours are so magnificent that I would make every effort to use them,’ Muller wrote to Caro in July 1863. Within a year, several aniline colours, including Hofmann’s violets and aniline black, were used to colour half-penny, penny and sixpenny stamps. It is possible that an aniline dye was used for later printings of the Penny Black, and Perkin was proud to note in a speech of 1887 that his mauve had been used since 1881 to send messages and love poems around the world. The stamps were used for the remainder of Queen Victoria’s reign, and were not withdrawn until 31 December 1901. But this is likely to have been the original mauve’s last commercial use.
*
Freed from the demands of industry, Perkin renewed his acquaintance with pure laboratory research, and made significant advances. Between 1874 and his death in 1907 he published over sixty scientific papers, most concerned with magnetic rotary power and the molecular architecture of a long list of increasingly useful chemical compounds. He worked on low-temperature combustion, revisited the constitution of his earliest dyes, and progressed from colour to scents. His nephew Arthur Waters remembered the smell of violets coming from his laboratory, although Perkin first produced synthetic coumarin, a scent associated with new-mown hay and the tonka bean.
Throughout his industrial career, one colour eluded him and his colleagues, and remained the Holy Grail of the synthetic dye trade until the end of the century: indigo. It was perhaps inevitable that its synthesis would first emerge in Germany, and predictable that its formula was made possible by a specific chemical reaction with its roots in Sudbury.
Natural indigo derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria, and came predominantly from India, where its preparation and use were first described to European traders by Marco Polo. It arrived in Verona and London in the thirteenth century, but was more expensive than woad and was used chiefly as an artist’s pigment. But it was in the sixteenth century, with the Dutch and British opening up of the East India trade, that the dye competed with spices for space on the shipping routes.
Several European countries banned ‘the devil’s colour’ on account of its effect on their native woad production, but England actively welcomed the trade from its own colonies, and the colour became increasingly fashionable as a textile dye in Paris and London. By 1770 Great Britain was importing almost one million pounds a year from its plantations in Bengal and South Carolina. A century later, India possessed 2,800 indigo factories, making blues for sailors’ uniforms, the Union flag and the army’s woollen greatcoats. None of them could have foreseen the synthetic revolution to come.
In Berlin and Munich a pupil of Robert Bunsen named Adolf von Baeyer had been working on the formula of artificial indigo since 1865. His progress was aided by William Perkin’s synthesis of cinnamic acid from benzaldehyde, and in 1880 he succeeded in preparing the dye in test-tube quantities. Money poured in from Hoechst and BASF (money obtained from the success of alizarin), but industrial production was hampered by the high cost of the base material toluene.*
It is possible that Perkin first heard about Baeyer’s advances when Heinrich Caro wrote to him from Mannheim on 10 December 1881. The letter reached him at Smedley’s Hydropathic Establishment, Matlock Bridge, Derbyshire.
My Dear Mr Perkin,
Let me now first of all hope that your present stay at Matlock may not be caused by anything further than your confidence in the restorative effects of hydropathic treatment upon the general system, and that you may now feel again refreshed and rested. [There is no record of Perkin being unwell]. You have gone through an astonishing amount of real hard work …
Baeyer has just been deeply afflicted by a terrible family bereavement. Perhaps you have heard that he lost his eldest son, a fine boy of eleven years by [the bite of] a mad dog. The accident happened in Flims, Switzerland, in August last, and the fatal consequence has followed quickly afterwards. Baeyer has now recovered from the terrible shock and is more active than ever … The theorising part of his investigations in the indigo group may now be considered, and you may soon read his elaborate work.
In 1890, Karl Heumann, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, discovered a new route to indigo using aniline and naphthalene, a synthesis using a new arrangement of the carbons that produced mauve and the very first coal-tar colours. This new process enabled BASF to control the supply of synthetic indigo, and within two decades it had devastated the traditional supplies from India.
While William Perkin took great pride in the chemical achievement, he received only a tiny fraction of the credit for its inception, and none of the fortune that accrued upon its production. The most sought-after colour had its roots in his factory, but was now being controlled abroad. He read in the Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists that BASF had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on the commercial production of indigo in the 1890s, an investment that would yield a staggering 152 German patents.
Perkin discussed the synthesis of indigo with his sons, who all studied chemistry and enjoyed distinguished careers. Like their father, they attended City of London School, and worked in a makeshift home laboratory during the holidays. Perkin’s eldest son, William Henry Perkin Jnr, would later work in Munich with Baeyer, and specialised in work on alkaloids such as strychnine and the synthesis of substances whose molecules contained carbon rings (before Perkin Jnr, it was believed that no ring with less than six carbon atoms could exist, but in 1884 he prepared rings with four). Perkin’s son had strong associations with Oxford University, where he was elected Waynflete Professor of Chemistry and Fellow of Magdalen College, but he also studied in Manchester, where he was nicknamed W.G. on account of the resemblance of both his beard and his bowling action to W. G. Grace.
He claimed as his assistant Chaim Weizmann, later to become the first president of the State of Israel. Weizmann worked as a dye chemist at the Clayton Aniline Company, where he also developed a commercial synthesis of camphor, used in medicine as a liniment. The Clayton Aniline Company had been founded by Charles Dreyfus, a Zionist and campaign manager for prime minister A. J. Balfour; it was Dreyfus who introduced Weizmann to Balfour in 1906, an alliance that led eventually to the declaration that pledged British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Within industry, W. H. Perkin Jnr’s greatest popular achievement concerned non-inflammable underwear. His manufacturing experience led to consultancy work for large companies, and he was asked to solve the dilemma of flannelette – a cotton with raised fibres and a wool-like touch – that was frequently used among the poor as cheap undergarments. Flannelette tended to ‘flash’ when exposed to extreme heat, and caused several deaths, especially among children. Perkin devised a fire-proof coating.
Arthur George Perkin followed his father to the Royal College of Chemistry in 1878, which by then had moved to South Kensington. His career was spent with dyestuffs, mostly blue: he was particularly concerned with the chemical properties of natural colours, but he also became manager of a Manchester firm making artificial alizarin. In 1905 he was engaged by the Indian government to supervise a study at Leeds University concerned with scientific ways to improve the production and prospects of natural indigo through improved fertilisers and better methods of extraction. But he was forced to concede that small improvements were ultimately futile in the face of the cheaper and more reliable artificial product from Germany.
In north London, his father spent much of his time picking up titles and science medals. In 1883 he became president of the Chemical Society, and a year later he was president of the Society of Chemical Industry. He was vice-president of the Roya
l Society from 1893 to 1894, master of the Leathersellers Company in 1896, and president of the Society of Dyers and Colourists and of the Faraday Society in 1907. The big societies awarded him the Davy Medal, the Longstaff Medal and the Albert Medal.
Despite this acclaim, few outside the chemical world knew who he was. His friends in the church knew only of his most basic achievements, and he was seldom bothered by the press. Perkin liked it like this. But things changed in 1906, the jubilee of the discovery of mauve.
The year began with King Edward offering him a knighthood, and some reluctance to accept. His sons persuaded him that he owed this honour to himself, and to them, and to chemistry.
‘Dear Papa,’ W. H. Perkin Jnr began a letter in February 1906,
We are all, of course, delighted at the prospect of your getting real recognition for your work at last and especially in consideration of the fact that you belong to that rather small body of workers who have never strived to advertise themselves in any way … Any honour which is conferred on you … is also an honour done to science and especially to industry, and you could not decline without doing an injustice and causing great disappointment. As you know, there has long been a feeling in scientific circles that research work has never been adequately recognised by our past Governments, as it is in Germany, and this is therefore a welcome step …†
A few weeks later, Perkin became a celebrity, a forgotten man rescued by an anniversary. After a while, the attention seemed to appeal to him. An international committee met to raise subscriptions for a bust and portrait, and to plan a month of celebrations. Every member of the Chemical Society received a form through the post, which they were asked to send back with a cheque or Post Office Order. The committee was chaired by the society’s president Professor Raphael Meldola, once a chemist at Brooke, Simpson and Spiller, who believed that Perkin’s reputation was assured, but vague. A year later he observed how, ‘with the passing of the generation which witnessed the interest aroused by the discovery of mauve, and which was fanned into temporary excitement by the sensational accounts circulated by the newspapers of the period, the memory of Perkin has faded from the public mind. To most of his fellow countrymen the memorable international gathering in London in 1906 came as a revelation that they could claim as their compatriot the man whom all the nations had sent their representatives to honour …‡
The celebration was held at the Royal Institution in July 1906, in the very room in which Faraday had lectured to Sir William as a boy. The official programme announced that ‘All further information can be obtained from the Stewards (Mauve badges)’. Dinner was taken at the Hotel Metropole in Northumberland Avenue. The following day, Perkin entertained friends at a garden party at his house, and a special train was organised to take his guests from Paddington via Greenford so that they might view his old works at Greenford Green, which were by then tenantless and disintegrating.
During these events, people wore a lot of mauve. As at Delmonico’s in New York a few weeks later, his colleagues tried to evaluate all he had done. There was a Perkin for everyone, and for every trade. Raphael Meldola was one of those who took the trip past his factory on the train and seemed disappointed with the impression it made. ‘These works would now appear quite insignificant in comparison with one of the great German establishments, and the whole output of dyes during the seventeen years that Perkin was connected with them was not very great as measured by modern standards. Nevertheless it may fairly be said that no single factory established in this country has ever given rise to such world-wide developments.’
Hundreds of chemists showed up for the celebrations, some with colour still on their hands. Without these people, far fewer shades of reds and purples and yellows and greens and blues: if they were not dead or dying they were there making speeches in front of Faraday’s original sample of benzene, and most of them also took pleasure in holding up a little glass phial containing a darkening lump of original Perkin mauve. They had come from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, America, Australia, Holland, France and Austria – Liebermann, Ulrich, Baekeland, Caro, Müller, Duisberg and 200 others, all with special stories and promises not to detain their audience unduly.
Carl Duisberg, director of Bayer in Elberfeld, seemed to spend the morning in a dream. He recalled how Faraday’s sample of benzene ‘expanded to an enormous vessel filled with millions and millions of gallons of this product. I saw all those gigantic factories in which benzene is employed and applied to manifold wonderful purposes … There appeared to me the thousands and thousands of coal-tar colours, commencing with mauve and magenta, passing on to artificial alizarin through the large series of rosanilines and azo-colours to the king of all artificial dyes, the synthetical indigo. Not alone these, but also the pharmaceutical industry, with the numerous pharmacological curatives, stood out distinctly before my mind …’ Before he woke up, Duisberg mentioned carbolic acid, antipyretics, antineuralgics, astringents and hypnotics. He mentioned artificial vanillin and violet and photochemical products, ‘and in the midst of this vision there stood out in actuality the man in mental and physical vigour who had founded all this’.
Perkin needed all vigours that Thursday morning, as he rose no less than nine times to pay thanks to the tribes of chemists who had paid thanks to him. He would return to his house that night laden with medals and framed inscriptions on parchment. La Société Chimique de Paris gave him the Lavoisier Medal; the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft presented him with the Hofmann Medal; he got a medal from La Société Industrielle de Mulhouse; the Technische Hochschule of Munich conferred an honorary doctorate. A woman called Nora Hastings read a poem:
A crown of Fame! Fulfilment of thy work well done,
And knowledge of people’s gratefulness;
The promise of life’s purpose, fully wrought and won,
And glorified by its great usefulness.
Sir Thomas Wardle, representing the Society of Dyers and Colourists, had come from Bradford to say that he could remember one of the very earliest batches of mauve, for he was one of the first to use it commercially in a dyehouse. He retold a true story that August Hofmann had told him not long before he died. He said that Hofmann was back teaching in Berlin, but had taken some of his students on a trip to America. On one expedition in the north-west they had come across a group of North American Indians, all of them dyed from head to foot in what looked like Perkin’s mauve.§
The colour had also reached Japan. Jintaro Takayama, president of the Tokyo Chemical Society, expressed great thanks for mauve, and wished Perkin long health and happiness and further researches advanced with an unimpaired activity. This wish was soon a theme, as all speakers blessed the 68-year-old man with great resilience. Even those who couldn’t attend had expressed this hope in Reuters telegrams, and they were read out to big applause. The Sydney section of the Society of Chemical Industry tendered cordial congratulations and hoped that he might long enjoy the pleasure of labouring for the advancement of chemical knowledge. One telegram was from Dr Bottiger, the man famous for Congo Red, the first cotton dye not to require a mordant for application. He wished Perkin a long life.
Raphael Meldola, the chairman of the celebrations, offered ‘the hearty wish that he may yet be spared for many years’. He also observed, with some regret, that ‘coal-tar is not a subject which lends itself readily to that hilarity which our visitors expect to be associated with an after-dinner speech’. He believed that the ‘one great joke’ which centres around the coal-tar industry had been so frequently repeated that it could no longer claim to be funny.
He tried it anyway. ‘It may be well to repeat once again that Sir William Perkin did not discover the coal-tar colours by observing the iridescent film on tar distributing itself over the surface of a pool of water.’ There was haughty laughter in the audience: ‘Some people can be so stupid.’ Meldola said there were other misapprehensions about Perkin’s colours that had taken much time to correct. He believed that the coal-tar indus
try ‘had had to pass through the phase of actual prejudice. I remember even, in my younger days, the term aniline dye was a term of reproach. A coal-tar dye was looked upon as gaudy, fugitive, and having every objectionable quality.’ He said it took a long while for the public to recognise ‘what a miserable colourless world this would be’ without them.
Sir Robert Pullar, for sixty years a practical dyer, said that it would take a whole evening to speak of the astonishing changes that had occurred in his industry since a man of eighteen had sent him a narrow sample of cloth. But he felt sad about how they were now enthralled by the chemists and techniques of Germany. Germany now made all the best colours. ‘I am afraid we shall need to go there for a long time yet to buy them.’
Many guests spoke in German or Dutch, but Professor Duisberg did his best torturing analogies in English. He and 3,500 German chemists were now gardeners in the extensive grounds laid out by Perkin fifty years ago, and he took unfortunate pleasure in stretching such a natural image for such an artificial breakthrough. ‘It has fallen to our lot to assist in cultivating and grafting the young plant planted by him when he invented mauve, and to gather the fruits from the large orchard, full of strong and mighty trees which have grown up to full maturity …’
Adolf von Baeyer was only present in spirit, but one of his recent lectures was presented to Perkin bound in mauve-dyed leather, and read. Baeyer had told his students that the key to aniline shades lay in the basic properties of the carbon atom. The rays of aniline colours ‘are the torch which enlightens the path of the explorer in the dark regions of the interior of the molecule, and the man who has lit the torch is …’ just getting up to speak for the sixth time that day.
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