THE WEALTH OF KNOWLEDGE^289finding a way to synthesize quinine, and Perkin took the problem
home with him to a litde laboratory he had fitted up in his family
house. He did not find a way to make quinine, but by the by he did
obtain a precipitate from naphtha (an ingredient of coal tar), aniline
black, from which he then derived the color aniline blue, or mauve.
(Chemistry has always been a science of serendipity.)
Perkin was alert enough to recognize the value of his find. His
blue coloring matter made an excellent dye, and after patenting it,
Perkin, then only nineteen years of age, set up a plant for its
manufacture with funds provided by his father and brother. That was
the end of his training at the Royal College. From this first lucky
strike to purposeful others, Perkin soon became a millionaire. And
then, another turn: he went back to his first love, experimental and
theoretical chemistry. Besides, the German chemical industry was
leaving the British far behind.
This first artificial dye was the stuff of dreams—the beginning of
the enormously important coal-tar color industry. Once Perkin had
given the cue, chemists in England, France, Germany, and
Switzerland turned to the task and a rainbow of artificial colors came
forth—fuchsia (fuchsine), magenta (after the blood shed in the battie
of that name), a range of purples, the whole alizarin family of reds,
pinks, oranges, and yellows, and a green that caused a sensation
because it did not turn blue in gaslight. * These colors in turn
stimulated demand for fashionable fabrics and weaned the women of
the rich countries of Europe from their traditional economical and
lugubrious black. (Today, richer still, many of them have gone back
to black, even at weddings.) More important in the long run,
however, was the ramification of the new techniques to wider
chemical developments: new illuminants, pharmaceuticals (aspirin,
salvarsan, sundry barbiturates, novocain, and dozens more),
photographic materials, artificial fertilizers, and, down the line,
plastics—all of these with the usual share of unexpected and
accidental finds.
Thanks to Perkin, Britain led the new industry. Britain had
everything going for it. To begin with, it had a huge, traditionally
* Alizarin was derived from anthracene, another component of coal tar. The synthe
sis was achieved by Perkin in England, Caro, Graebe, and Liebermann in Germany in- The market effect was stunning: in 1870 natural alizarin as derived from mad
der cost 90 marks a kilo; the synthetic, 8 marks. Madder, long a feature of the land
scape of Provence, was now history—Milward and Saul, Economic Development, p. 229.