(^288) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
"marking time." Announcement after announcement of success had
proved false. Not that the government inspectors were gullible or
complaisant, but they put more emphasis on the theoretical purity of
the metal than on its performance (hardness, edge, etc.). They were
also "sold" on the importance of size (gigantisme) in circumstances
of diseconomies of scale. The result was waste, dead ends, and
commercial failure.^17
After that came the revolution and Napoleon. More marking time.
Only in the 1820s did the French learn how to make crucible steel,
thanks to a British expatriate named James Jackson. The Germans
did it about ten years earlier, essentially without outside help. The
Swiss Johann Conrad Fischer, a keenly observant and indefatigably
peripatetic visitor of foreign enterprises—his nose and eyes were
everywhere—learned to do it from about 1805.^18
It takes more than recipes, blueprints, and even personal testimony
to learn industrial cuisine.
Genius Is Not Enough
In the mid-nineteenth century, the alkaloid quinine was of vital
importance to British rule in India, where malaria enfeebled and
killed civilian and military personnel. Quinine did not cure the
disease, but it relieved the symptoms. At that time, quinine was
obtained from the bark of the cinchona tree, which was native to
Peru. The British government, working through the world-famous
botanical gardens at Kew, was making strenuous efforts to obtain
cinchona seeds in Peru, nurse them into seedlings, and then plant
them in India, but the results proved disappointing. India remained
dependent on high-cost imports from Java, where the Dutch had
managed to obtain a better transplant. The British would have
preferred their own supply.
William Henry Perkin, born in London in 1838, was the son of a
builder and had no connection with India. His father wished him to
be an architect (social promotion), but early on he wanted to do
chemistry. In 1853, only fifteen, he entered the newly founded Royal
College of Chemistry, then under the direction of a German
scientist, August Wilhelm Hofmann, who liked the boy and took
him on as an assistant. Hofmann put Perkin onto the importance of
nora
(Nora)
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