‘I have very little more left – but I am sure you will appreciate it. I also have pleasure in enclosing a small piece of silk which is a portion of a dress accepted by Queen Victoria at the 1862 Exhibition.’
† C. M. Whittaker, a senior dye chemist at Read Holliday in Huddersfield, recalled how, during the war, those in the dye trade went from being relatively unrewarded and unprotected into die most sought-after of professionals. ‘The period of the First World War was a severe moral testing time … One became a little tin-god on wheels overnight: one was fawned on from all sides.’
Read Holliday (as part of British Dyes Ltd) supplied khaki yellow and khaki brown. ‘I have frequently said that the then-small British dyemakers have never been given proper credit for the competent way in which they fulfilled the demand for dyes for the uniforms of the British and some of their Allies. The shortage of dyes was such that die prices obtainable made it frequently more profitable for a dyer to sell his actual dye stock rather than use it.’ At the end of the war the British Dyes staff in Huddersfield were fêted with a lavish dinner-dance, ‘during which a bombastic speech told them that they had helped to win the war. On the Saturday morning over fifty chemists got die sack.’
‡ In 1917, largely as a result of experiments at Levinstein and Co. at Blackley, the Manchester Guardian reported that from this time on, ‘dyes and drugs must be thought of together. Whatever serves the modern dyemaker directly serves national health.’ Domagk’s work on Prontosil and the sulfa drugs in the mid-1930s is credited with prolonging the lives of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr, and was considered so important by Alexander Fleming that in the early 1930s he temporarily prioritised work on Prontosil over his development of penicillin. Prontosil’s formula was tweaked by the French and the chemists of May and Baker in Britain, leading to new so-called M & B drugs before the war. Domagk’s work led to the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1939, but Hitler’s disapproval of the award of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize to Carl von Ossietzky, whom he had imprisoned, led to Domagk being unable to accept his award until 1947.
§ IG Farben’s official formation came in 1925, by which point it had incorporated 50 dependent firms and controlled more than 100 plants and mines. At its peak in the inter-war years, IG Farben employed 120,000 workers, including 1,000 qualified chemists. Its dyetrade accounted for about a third of its output, and although it did not produce the best new dye innovations in this period (that accolade went to ICI), its huge expansion was due to its skilled marketing experience, especially as it switched from its closed European markets to the East.
12
THE NEW EVENTUALITY
Colour may be extracted from substances, whether they possess it naturally or by communication, in various ways. We have thus the power to remove it intentionally for a useful purpose, but, on the other hand, if often flies contrary to our wish.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810
He, Mertens, was a young chemist, German and Catholic, and I a young chemist, Italian and Jewish. Potentially two colleagues: in fact we worked in the same factory, but I was inside the barbed wire, and he outside. There were forty thousand of us employed in the Buna Works at Auschwitz. That the two of us, he an Oberingenieur and I a slave-chemist, ever met is improbable …
Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve, 1981
Lady Perkin died in the spring of 1929 at the age of ninety. After her husband’s death she had maintained his charitable work for local church groups and the Salvation Army. Her daughters had made her proud, one taking up missionary work, another becoming a nurse. At the time of her death the local paper called her ‘a kindly, gracious and, lovable Lady Bountiful’, and observed that Sudbury had quite transformed itself from the once secluded village she knew at the time of her marriage. By 1929, there were very few locals who could tell you much about her husband’s pioneering endeavours, or what had become of them.
Nine years later, 100 years after his birth, Perkin was a celebrity once more, at least in the halls of the chemical societies. On this particular anniversary, dye people made speeches, the past was exaggerated, bow-ties were worn. At the London patent office, there were the clear signs of a resurgence in the British colour industry, although the frequent presence of the letters IG emphasised the continued and towering force of German competition. The patent specifications included new dyeing applications – coloured moulded articles, hardened casein, cellulose acetate rayon – new colours used in new ways on the new plastics and man-made fibres. And on the East Coast of America, Du Pont had just registered a new material called nylon.
As with most anniversaries, the centenary of Perkin’s birth may teach us useful lessons in reputations. We may learn, for example, that William Perkin was now revered for lighting the path towards rayon, synthetic rubber and other items indelibly linked with a modern age. When dye chemists got up at the Leathersellers’ Hall and the Victoria Hotel, Bradford, to sing of Perkin, their audience found plastic on their tables and another story of amateurish scientific romance.
Belgian Leo Baekeland shared the occasional career twist with William Perkin, and some with the Mad Professors of folklore. Baekeland trained as a chemist in Ghent with an ambition towards academe, but a honeymoon in America made him aware of how industrial chemistry might meet the demands of a consumer society. In 1899 he made $1 million dollars by selling George Eastman his invention of Velox, an improved photographic paper that enabled users to develop their work in artificial light.
Baekeland took his fortune to a homemade laboratory in a hut on his estate overlooking the Hudson River in New York, and looked to expand it by developing electric insulators. The universal insulator for electrical coils was shellac, the resinous amber-coloured secretions of the Laccifer lacca beetle of southern Asia, where it was mostly used as a wood preservative. By 1900 demand was already outstripping supply (it took 15,000 enthusiastic beetles six months to produce one pound of shellac), and Baekeland believed he might be able to make synthetic shellac at home.
His starting point was something that a dye chemist had made at the bottom of a beaker and then thrown away. Several years before he synthesised indigo, Adolf von Baeyer had been experimenting with phenol (the turpentine-like solvent distilled from coal-tar) and formaldehyde (the disinfectant and embalming fluid obtained from wood alcohol). Thirty years later, Baekeland discovered – after several other Bavarian, Austrian and British chemists had toiled away at different permutations of the phenol-formaldehyde reaction and produced a soft casein plastic known as Galalith or Erinoid – that the residue rejected by Baeyer might form the basis of synthetic shellac, or what he soon called polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, and most people called Bakelite.
The key lay in his Bakelizer, an iron boiler that transformed the phenol and formaldehyde reaction under extreme heat from a liquid coating or gummy paste into a hard, translucent and mouldable substance that would set the path for Plexiglas, vinyl and Teflon.*
Bakelite was announced in 1909 with great claims, most of them valid: it was a better insulator than shellac, and it would not burn or boil, fade or discolour. It was not the first plastic (celluloid), but it was the first plastic to be 100 per cent synthetic. Within two decades it encased electrical coils, radio valves and telephone bells, and made a fortune for the company that made the first Bakelite billiard balls. Baekeland won some awards for his work, one of which he particularly treasured: the Perkin Medal.
Among the speakers at the Perkin centenary, Herbert Levinstein told the Chemical Society that Perkin had been ‘like a foxhound puppy’ dashing here and there in pursuit of knowledge. He thought that this may have been because, like Faraday, he had not attended one of the top boarding schools and thus benefited from an unregimented mind. He said it was wrong for present-day chemistry students to think of him stumbling upon mauve as a lucky break, calling it ‘in fact the least accidental of discoveries’ on account of his curiosity and systematic methods of inquiry.
Levinstein ran through Perkin’s career, and closed with the wish that his work would continue to inspire the conquest of tropical disease: ‘By biochemical research, organic chemistry may make its greatest contribution to a tortured world.’
A few weeks later, the chemistry scholar F. M. Rowe addressed the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He said there was now a tendency to belittle Perkin because he was an opportunist; as in 1856, pure research still liked to denigrate his commercial instincts. Referring to his death, he revealed that he was unaccountably averse to traditional medicine, calling for his dietician and dismissing his doctor when the symptoms of his pneumonia first appeared. Given what his dyes had achieved since, the irony of this did not go unnoticed.
The anniversary was celebrated with some optimism, for British dye firms had made good use of tariff protection to expand both output and technical innovation. In 1938, ICI controlled about 60 per cent of British sales and had developed important new dyes for the new cellulose fabrics. Before the war, British firms had strengthened their links with IG Farben, predominantly in an attempt to divide up new markets and underwriting fundamental research into new polymers. German occupation of mainland Europe led to the return of old cartels, and a full appreciation of what use the wealth of huge dyeworks could be put.
In 1939, ICI was producing about 200 tons each week of its great new discovery, polythene. Some of this sheathed the new revolution in cable communications. In 1940, the polythene casing of airborne radar enabled the Royal Air Force to detect and intercept German bombers. In Germany, where the war effort initially enjoyed no such privilege, the production of synthetic materials was focusing on rubber and oil.
IG Farben did not officially became part of the Nazi party, but Hitler could not have contemplated war without it.† Initially Hitler had despised the company’s internationalism and the employment of the many Jewish chemists that had ensured its prominence (it was classified as a non-Aryan operation), but he realised he needed the synthetic self-sufficiency it made possible. By 1937, the directors and leading scientists of IG Farben who were not Nazis already (or who had not already fled the company) acknowledged that they needed Hitler for future expansion. The combine of dye companies had diversified into strategic raw materials such as synthetic rubber and oil, yet recession and high development costs had almost brought the company to its knees in the early 1930s. But the materials were ideally suited to the modern war machine, and the Nazis placed great value upon them. The depth of this partnership was recorded at Auschwitz.
The grim, resonant phrase ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ appeared on posters in the Buna rubber factories of IG Farben before it appeared above the gates of the concentration camps, primarily as a disincentive from joining the trade union movement. Buna (an abbreviation of its main components butadiene and natrium) was one of IG Farben’s great synthetic inventions, and, among other uses, had wrapped itself around the wheeltracks of tanks. By the outbreak of war, its two plants were considered insufficient, and in 1941 the search for a new site led the company to establish Monowitz-Buna, the slave labour camp eight kilometres from Auschwitz. About 40,000 prisoners, mostly Jews, were put to work there, and at least 25,000 died. Primo Levi, one of the skilled chemists at the camp, noted in his great testament If This is a Man that not one gram of synthetic rubber ever made it beyond the factory walls. One of IG Farben’s subsidiaries, Degesch, manufactured Zyklon B, the poisonous gas initially marketed as an insecticide, but swiftly sent to Birkenau in grey crates as the principal method of murdering Europe’s Jews.
* Almost too good to be true, one pre-Bakelite advance towards synthetic plastic was made when a cat knocked over some formaldehyde into her saucer of milk at the Bavarian laboratory of Adolf Spitteler. This made it curdle into a hard substance resembling celluloid, and Spitteler was then only weeks away from developing an early casein plastic, sometimes known as Lactoid.
† Even at the time of the Weimar Republic, Gustav Stresemann, chancellor and foreign minister, noted ‘Without I.G. and coal, I can have no foreign policy.’ A team of civilian and military experts assigned by General Eisenhower after the war concluded, ‘Without I.G.’s immense productive facilities, its far-reaching research, varied technical experience and overall concentration of economic power, Germany would not have been in the position to start its aggressive war in September 1939.’
13
PHYSICAL ACTS
British scientists have created the world’s first electronic dictionary of colours, a digital palette containing more than 16 million shades. As a result, colours can now be transmitted electronically and accurately, allowing designers, manufacturers of cosmetics, and fashion workers to exchange images in precisely defined colours for the first time.
The system – developed at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology – has been designated as one of the Government’s key industrial projects for the new Millennium and it is already being used by Marks and Spencer and cosmetics manufacturers. You can see what your M&S shirt will look like inside a store, and then out in the street. No more suave mauve creations turning naff pink in daylight.
Robin McKie, Observer, December 1998
In 1956, people who liked colour and the effect it had on the world gathered alongside those who worked in textiles, drugs, perfumes and plastics to celebrate 100 years of mauve. People had only good things to say about William Perkin and the change he had created.
By 1956, basic colours were not really the thing any more. New shades tended not to cause a sensation. The big issue was technique – how to put synthetic colours on new acetates and rayons, fabrics that melted when you ironed them. In 1956, the most fashionable colour was black.
The big new synthetic inventions of 1956 found mostly peaceful uses. The Swiss inventor George de Mestral patented Velcro, Procter and Gamble gave babies disposable nappies, and a Connecticut doctor Vernon Krieble announced the instant superglue resin Loctite. In 1956, a junior advertising executive called Shirley Polykoff coined a winning phrase at the Manhattan agency Foote, Cone & Belding for its client Clairol and the product Miss Clairol. Miss Clairol was the first home-use hair dye that you applied just like a shampoo. It was cheaper and quicker than a professional job, and it brightened up the city streets. Polykoff’s slogan was: ‘Does she or doesn’t she?’
In 1956, Lawrence Herbert joined a small Manhattan company called Pantone, and not long afterwards developed the Pantone global colour language, the world’s most widely used colour standardisation and matching system for textiles, cosmetics, paints and inks. And at ICI in 1956, the most significant modern step forward in dye chemistry took the form of reactive dyes, which the company called Procions. These dyes were the first to react chemically with the material, a process involving the addition of sodium chloride and alkali, forming an intense bond with the fibres they coloured, particularly useful in preventing fading on cotton and wool.
In 1956, a year when the United Kingdom produced 90 per cent of the dye used within its shores, the Perkin Centenary began in May on a moody note. An editorial in The Dyer and Textile Printer observed that while the world’s chemists prepared to whoop it up on an industrial scale, no one in the outside world seemed to care very much. ‘It is regrettable, we think, that so little is being done to erect plaques on some of the buildings connected with Perkin. This is a traditional way of commemorating the great and arousing interest in them, and London in particular is full of plaques, many of them to far less important people than Perkin. Yet the London County Council some five years ago declined to place a plaque on his birthplace because of the condition of the building.’ The Dyer judged this naive; why not a plaque now, and then if it gets knocked down another plaque saying, ‘In a house on this site …’?
Near the factory, the enthusiasm was not much greater. ‘In the Greenford and Sudbury districts, the local authorities have never shown much interest in Perkin (Wembley Borough Council has gone so far as to give the name of Butler, a
former mayor, to a garden and recreation ground on the site of the garden in Sudbury in which Perkin grew madder …)’*
In the week this observation appeared, Perkin had taken over the halls of England. His reputation was monumental: in the fifty years since the jubilee, in the forty-nine since his death, he had achieved more than he could have dreamed and probably more than he wanted. Almost nothing seemed to exist without him now; guests wore the mauve ties and sat at mauve tablecloths and wore synthetics, and there was dancing to shellac 78s.
The big London events included lectures at the Royal Institution, a soirée in honour of overseas visitors from fourteen countries (at the Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers, attended by the President of the Board of Trade), a reception at the rebuilt Guildhall, and an essay competition sponsored by the London Section of the Society of Dyers and Colourists (SDC), for under-26-year-olds, on ‘The influence of Perkin’s Discovery, and of the synthetic dyes which followed it, on any trade of the candidate’s choice’. (Six months later, the London Society reported that the essay competition ‘met with a most disappointing response’, and only a consolation prize of five guineas was deemed suitable.)
A banquet at the Dorchester was enjoyed by 400. The guest of honour was the Marquess of Salisbury, who felt that insufficient credit had been accorded to Perkin’s father, who had risked his savings on the whim of a youth. There was tribute too to Perkin’s brother Thomas, who had succumbed to a brain haemorrhage in 1891 at the age of sixty. There were telegrams and scrolls from India, Japan, Norway and Pakistan. H. Inouye, the president of the Japan Chemical Association, spoke of his industry’s debt to ‘Mauve man’, and welcomed all the new branches of chemistry he made possible. ‘All this, we believe, proclaims the immortal glory of Perkin … We take this opportunity of saying that we are very anxious to do all possible in the cause of world peace and the happiness of mankind, working side by side with worldwide chemists and scientists.’
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