Cooke shows his visitors the results of his work – a large flask with a little blue ink sloshing inside, and another with an oily yellow solution that will only turn blue when in contact with the air.
‘It’s worked very well from all points of view,’ says Dr Gilbert. ‘We’ve developed a better method of extraction, and in the lab we’ve done some rudimentary breeding, and some good molecular work looking at the genetics that control the colouring features.’ She has calculated that 200,000 hectares of land are required to produce enough woad to supply the UK’s demand for blue.
‘People do tend to think of natural dyes as only being these washed-out browns and beiges and greens,’ says Dr Gilbert, who is wearing a sweatshirt embroidered with the slogan United Colors of Benetton.
She produces a box containing wools and cottons dyed with natural indigo, some in a deep and sumptuous hue. She has hooked up her Windows Screensaver to run a pattern of multiplying pipes coloured with a photograph of these natural colours. ‘It takes a bit of persuading to get people to accept that you can get almost the same array of colour from natural sources, not least because the chemical industry has helped us understand the formula of dyes far better. We can now use what chemistry has learnt, but in a natural way. This knowledge wasn’t available in the nineteenth century.’
She explains the process. She takes the leaves and extracts them into water. She uses hot water to burst the cells, and the precursors (chemical substances that give rise to more significant ones) are released into the extraction liquid. She then cools it down, and alters the pH to make it alkaline (by adding lime). Then she aerates it and pursues the ancient process of drying and fermentation. In the traditional method there was much wastage, as the precursors would frequently react with other molecules and form other by-products; with the modern process, the conditions are altered chemically to ensure that the base molecules making indigo generally do meet another suitable molecule. As indigo is insoluble it sinks to the bottom of a tank, making it easy to dispose of the top layer of liquid and leave basic indigo, which is then dried into powder.
‘Obviously we’re not going to replace all synthetic chemicals,’ Gilbert says, ‘but I think people are pleased that the balance is moving back.’
‘This puts the foot in the door,’ Cooke continues. ‘It suggests that it is possible for life to continue as we know it after coal and oil is gone, that we have not completely forgotten how to produce things in a way that is not artificial.
‘It’s like all these things. It will start as a trend. Some designer will feature naturally dyed garments as part of their Paris collection, and then this will be taken up by the well-heeled, and then the fashion chain stores will make copies, again with a natural tag on them, and then everyone will latch onto them.’
And there is another route for the re-emergence of woad. ‘Levi’s have already started making custom jeans – you ring up or go to their Internet site and give them your measurements and choose your style of cloth and type of fade that you like. It may cost anything from £100 to £200. And one of the options which Levi’s would be very keen to offer will be a naturally dyed pair of jeans. For the wearer it could become a source of pride, perhaps a sort of one-upmanship. It may be considered a slightly greener alternative, and for that they will be prepared to pay a premium. For Levi’s, jeans dyed with natural indigo may only cost 50 pence more per pair, but they could charge £20 more. Once that starts to take hold as a fad, it will gradually find its way into the mainstream. Recently there was a fashion for army-style combat trousers, but that’s passed. People are going back to blue jeans again. And Levi’s have told us that as soon as we can provide enough natural indigo to satisfy their requirements, they’ll buy it.’
* Heinrich Caro worked with Baeyer on the indigo process, and Caro’s patent described the modification of the Perkin process. In practical use, the dye was produced on the fabric during the last stage of printing.
† On 10 March 1906, William Perkin Jnr wrote again, enquiring about the atomic structures of various synthetic perfumes and wishing his father a happy birthday. ‘These days a man is still young at 68. A short time ago I bought a very convenient and accurate weighing machine which I keep in the bedroom, and if you have not got one I will send you one as a present.’
‡ On 28 June 1906, Caro wrote that he was looking forward to coming over to present Perkin with his personal congratulations. ‘As you are probably informed, much interest is taken in your jubilee by my German fellow chemists, but I have noticed that the younger generation, being intensely bent upon the refinement of their present and future tasks, has almost lost the “historical sense” availing in our youngest days.’
§ August Hofmann died in 1892. His legacy was one of limited chemical innovation but great inspiration. Many of his pupils in London and Berlin scaled greater heights of practical achievement, but all acknowledged his early encouragements regarding benzene, toluene and their amino compounds, and his contributions to the theories of molecular formulae. Many reactions still bear his name. In Germany he helped establish the strong patent system for the chemical industry, and was made a baron four years before he died. He married four times, believed to be a record in the field of German chemistry at that time.
11
SELF-DESTRUCTION
Like William Perkin I personally aspire
to metamorphose lower into higher.
His transforming coal-tar into brilliant dyes
has come for me of late to symbolise
chemistry at its most profound and true
creating radiance out of basest residue.
It is infinitely satisfying
to see what was black dreck serve the art of dyeing.
Those are the powers and forces that are needed
if the Western World is not to be superseded.
William Perkin’s ingenious transformation
could have benefited the British nation
But unfortunately Great Britain still relies
on Germany for all synthetic dyes.
The coal tars of the Ruhr and Rhine
metamorphosed in industrial bulk into aniline.
If more of us in Britain had done work in
the processes pioneered by William Perkin
we would not now as a nation still have to rely
on Germany for all synthetic dye.
Like many a physical or chemical invention
pioneered by the British I could mention
Perkin’s valuable synthetic dyes
which will always, for yours truly, symbolise
the magic of chemistry, Germans monopolise.
Sir William Crookes, historian, physicist, spiritualist and chemist (he trained under Hofmann, discovered the element thallium and conducted important experiments on cathode rays and radiation), as portrayed in the play Square Rounds by Tony Harrison, first performed at the National Theatre in 1992
In December 1914, William Perkin’s third son, Frederick Mollwo Perkin, delivered a speech to the Society of Dyers and Colourists which suggested that a particular problem in the dyestuffs trade was having a dramatic effect on the war effort. But the meeting at which he spoke was sparsely attended, for many managers of English dye companies were engaged in an emergency meeting at the Board of Trade to ensure an adequate colour supply for the manufacture of soldiers’ uniforms.
In Germany, the country which now supplied 80 per cent of Britain’s artificial colour, the massive dye factories were being expanded to make a product which used the similar basic materials of benzol, toluol, nitric and sulphuric acids: explosives.
‘A devastating war has broken out, stopping our supplies of imported colours, and what is the result?’ Perkin asked. ‘There is a dye famine. Dyers cannot carry out their contracts because, although willing to pay almost any price, they cannot obtain the dyes.’ The value of imported dyes was estimated at between £2 million and £3 million per annum, and the £100 million textile industry wa
s entirely dependent on them. Other industries were also badly affected: paper, leather, bones, paint, wood and food increasingly relied on synthetic colour. At the start of the war, British manufacturers produced only about 15 per cent of all dyes used in the United Kingdom, and although the priority had switched from fashion to the military, it was clear that a once-great industry was now failing its people. The fact that wartime apparel was drab is usually explained in terms of frugality and respect; in fact, there were simply no colour dyes. And the relatively small scale of the dye industry in Britain meant that the supply of nitro compounds needed for explosives was quite insufficient. What had caused this crisis? Perkin’s explanation was extensive and damning. At its heart lay an attempt to defend the reputation of his father.*
‘I have seen it in the Press,’ Dr Mollwo Perkin announced, ‘and have also heard it in conversation, that it was not a very patriotic step to dispose of a successful works at the age of thirty-six.’ But he reasoned that his father had no choice. As with other industries, the dye trade required continual change: only the companies with the best new colours, and the most efficient methods of making them, would capture the market. ‘It was not possible for one brain, however energetic and fertile, to carry out all the necessary research required …’ And research chemists could not be obtained because British universities were reluctant to train them. There were German chemists of course, but most who gained experience at British firms soon returned home. Britain did not foster a good relationship between its universities and industry, and industry had nothing to compare with the magnificent research laboratories in Germany and Switzerland. At the outbreak of war, Hoechst employed more than 200 research chemists, where Levinstein and Read Holliday had but a handful. And in Germany they had been building on a green field, with fewer and smaller established industries telling them which way to go. New industries developed on the Rhine without having the weight of a hundred years of textile industry on their shoulders.†
But there were other reasons for Germany’s dominance, and they pained Perkin to reveal them. ‘There certainly has been a lot of piracy,’ he claimed, citing the chaotic British patent laws. In fact, in the first decades of the industry these laws were so haphazard as to offer hardly any protection at all, and hence chemists from Berlin and Munich appropriated the best brains and foreign methods for their own use. The British government allowed foreign chemists to take out patents in Britain which they were not required to work, but German patents were invariably refused to British inventors.
Perkin had other explanations, which soon began to sound like excuses: British industry received far less outside investment from banks and other institutions; British capitalists lacked the long-term vision to reinvest in new processes and machinery, and chose immediate profits over continued research; British capital received a greater profit from shipping, the docks and the mines, or abroad with the advance of the American railroad. Then there was the problem of marketing skills: armed with huge colour sample books, German dye salesmen had the confidence to convince anyone that they could supply any shade cheaper. And then there was also the question of alcohol: the large quantities of pure alcohol required for some of the newer dyes was made prohibitively expensive in Britain by duty and excise restrictions, whereas in Germany it was plentiful and cheap.
Perkin’s analysis carried an air of desperation. The war had cruelly exposed British weakness, but the danger had been gravely apparent when his father was still alive. Indeed at the jubilee celebrations of mauve, Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, acknowledged the criticism pitched towards his cabinet. Haldane was the key speaker at the Hotel Metropole, and he began his address looking towards the guests from abroad. ‘I have often thought that it must strike you as somewhat odd to see the way in which we attend to these things in this country.’ One of the British chemists then shouted out, ‘Or do not attend’.
Haldane said he was thrilled with the globalisation of the industry. He noted the ‘magnificent organisations’ of the dye industry abroad, ‘and the extraordinary capacity your governments show in excess of ours in taking care of science’. He had a reason for the different approach in the United Kingdom. ‘We are a very practical nation,’ he said, ‘and yet we do muddle through somehow.’ People in his audience laughed. ‘It is quite true that our state takes, in the first instance, but little interest in science.’ This was an extraordinary admission from a minister. His reasoning suggested that there was no need for any great institutional support, for genius appeared to do it all by itself. ‘We do not organise in this country, we hate abstract ideas, and we put difficulties rather than encouragement in the path of the discoverer.’ Haldane said that the great scientists and architects and engineers still made their way to the front, and that night he had one prime example: the mention of Perkin’s name inevitably drew applause, but Perkin himself must have looked away.
Haldane continued with an interesting analysis, in which he blamed the calamitous state of the colour industry on the death of Prince Albert. ‘I have often thought that if the Prince Consort had lived, probably Hofmann would have remained in this country, and … aided by that great spirit, the centre of the coal-tar industry and all its products and – what appeals to us so much – of the many millions which have come out of those products [laughter], would have remained in Britain and not have passed to Germany.’
What a shame, the minister noted, that British universities did not resemble factories with great chimneys, the way they did in Berlin, or house twelve professors of chemistry. He spoke as a War Secretary in peacetime, and could have little known the far-reaching consequence of his words just seven years on.
A short while later, it was left to Carl Duisberg, the general director and an expert marketeer at Bayer, to explain why his country now put the British colour trade to shame. It was not lack of finance: Britain was still the wealthiest country in the world, while Germany, when it began its organic chemical industries in earnest just thirty years before, was one of the poorest. He claimed that patent laws, or the lack of them, had not been the main key to German expansion.
Duisberg claimed there were more fundamental ethnic characteristics at play, one of those potent generalisations that surface most frequently at a time of national tensions. The English were simply not good at patience and the sort of self-belief required when waiting for success. ‘For all that the Englishman does he expects soon to be compensated in hard cash,’ Duisberg claimed. He was perhaps thinking of conservative British bankers’ willingness to let their foreign counterparts invest in high-risk scientific endeavour; there was simply no way of calculating the potential earning capacity of chemical discovery. ‘It requires above all a singular ability to wait and bide things coming combined with endless patience and trouble,’ Duisberg noted. ‘We Germans possess in a special degree this quality of working and waiting at the same time, and of taking pleasure in scientific results without technical success.’
The prime example was indigo. The biggest single factor in Germany’s success lay not in Hofmann’s defection, but in Baeyer’s breakthrough, and that had come about after two decades of furtive and intensive research involving hundreds of scientists from several large companies. There was little doubt that ultimate success would bring riches and acclaim and a large springboard for further technical advance, and so it proved for BASF and Hoechst. In 1905, two years before the death of William Perkin, Baeyer’s work on indigo won him the Nobel Prize.
Carl Duisberg argued that as soon as Germany had the monopoly on indigo there was not much that could be done. Britain had suffered in India, but this was nothing compared to how it would suffer at home. Within ten years of the first commercial manufacture of indigo along the Ruhr, Germany’s output was probably around 100 times the total 60-year production of mauve, and fast approaching the total output of all the other artificial colours produced to date.
English dye companies put up disciplined resistance. Their strongest voice was
German, and came from Ivan and Herbert Levinstein’s once-flourishing factory at Blackley. Levinstein’s own ambitions to produce indigo were thwarted by that peculiar facet of English patent law that allowed foreign firms to take out a patent with no obligation to work it. In this way overseas companies sealed their monopolies: Levinstein claimed that out of the 600-odd British patents assigned to foreign companies between 1891 and 1895, not one was being exploited.
What really rankled was the destructive sense of German arrogance (which may now be seen as prescience). In 1900, Heinrich Brunok, managing director of BASF, suggested that the production of Indian indigo should be abandoned in favour of food crops. The British government shrugged by with half-measures, including the ruling that military uniforms should only be dyed with natural dyestuffs, and by the time it woke up to the scale of the problem in 1907 Britain’s competitors had established a wholly intimidating advantage.
In this year, David Lloyd George, President of the Board of Trade and the man later honoured by ICI as the person who did most to rescue the British chemical industry, reformed the patent laws. From now on, overseas companies were required to work their British patents or risk losing them, an amendment that speeded up the establishment of the Hoechst indigo works at Ellesmere Port, near Liverpool, the following year. One of its barrels of indigo was sent to Lloyd George with a message embossed in gold: ‘Made in England’.
But profited by Germans. Hoechst (which was still strictly known by the name of its founders, Meister Lucius & Bruning) employed predominantly German workers who operated under intense security. Levinstein complained that even when German firms revealed their patents, they deliberately omitted vital information, and concealed the fact that one key ingredient, phenylglycine, was wholly imported from factories by the Rhine. Besides, although the production of indigo at the Ellesmere Port works increased from 9 tons in 1908 to 293 tons in 1913, this was quite insufficient to meet British needs. In 1913, 1,194 tons were still being imported from Germany, and this despite the recent establishment of a BASF factory on Merseyside. In 1914, the three leading British firms Ivan Levinstein, Read Holliday and British Alizarine together produced about 4,000 tons of dyes. The major German firms produced 140,000.
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