The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  In 1851 Siemens announced what would become his greatest invention—the dynamo-electrical machine.5 He clearly foresaw the exceptional growth of power engineering, with Siemens & Halske repeatedly introducing new applications for electric current: in 1879 the first electric railway was presented at the Berlin Trade Fair, and the first electric street-lights were installed in Berlin’s Kaisergalerie; in 1880 the first electric elevator was built in Mannheim; in 1881 the world’s first electric streetcar went into service in Berlin-Lichterfelde; in 1886 the first electric trolley bus made its appearance; in 1887 the Berlin Mauerstrasse power station opened; in 1891 the first electric drills were made; and in 1892 the electricity meter, indicating the widespread acceptance of electrical machines, was installed. The name Siemens became synonymous with Elektrotechnik, a word coined by Siemens himself.6

  In 1879 he helped found the Elektrotechnischer Verein (Engineering Society), one of whose aims was the introduction of faculties for electrical engineering at the technische Hochschule. By then he had been elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, in 1874, a rare—and perhaps unique—honor for someone who did not have a PhD.

  THE COLOR REVOLUTION

  In 1862, Queen Victoria attended the London International Exhibition in South Kensington wearing a vivid mauve gown. This choice, says Diarmuid Jeffreys, was more significant than might appear because one of the main exhibits at the show was a massive pillar of purple dye. “Sitting next to the pile was its inventor/discoverer, William Perkin.”7

  Perkin, like Siemens, had always been interested in engineering and in chemistry. He had been a student at the new Royal College of Chemistry, established as a consequence of the growing awareness in Britain that its science was lagging behind that of its continental competitors, Germany in particular. Among the benefactors of the college was Prince Albert, the prince consort, who, as noted in an earlier chapter, had persuaded the celebrated German scientist, August Wilhelm von Hofmann (then only twenty-eight) to be the first professor at the Royal College. Perkin started as one of his students, but by 1856 had been appointed Hofmann’s personal laboratory assistant.8

  Hofmann began this collaboration by suggesting that Perkin try to synthesize quinine. Virtually every professional chemist had been trying to do this for years, as a synthetic cure for malaria (vital in an age of colonial expansion). Like everyone else, Perkin failed but then he toyed with a substance called allyl toluidine and, “by one of those flukes of science,” the aniline Perkin used contained impurities. Entirely unexpectedly, he found that the black sludge left behind, when washed with water, turned a vivid purple.

  Throughout history until that point, people had little choice in the colors available for their clothes. Derived from animal, vegetable, and mineral substances, the “earth colors”—reds, browns and yellows—were by far the most common, and the cheapest.9 As a result, the rarer colors were much sought after, blue and purple in particular. On top of that, under the industrial revolution, millions of yards of cotton fabric were being produced by the new machine-driven textile mills of Lancashire and elsewhere, and opportunities for cheaper and more interesting colors were opening up.10 Perkin therefore took out a patent on his purple dye and set up a factory in London. He called his new color mauveine, or mauve, and it quickly became popular, helped by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, who wore it because she thought it matched her eyes. By the time he was thirty-five, Perkin was rich.

  The Germans, through Hofmann, had had a hand in Perkin’s education. Now they saw their chance to take a dividend. With abundant coal in the Ruhr and more chemists than anywhere else, coal-dye companies sprang up all over Germany. A plethora of new synthetic dyes was rapidly discovered and in no time German dye companies led the world.11 Coal-tar dyes expanded so quickly that, within a few decades of the end of the century, they had virtually eliminated natural colors from the market. Once the colors became standardized (not easy with natural products), a stability was introduced to the market that hadn’t been there before.

  The new color industry also owed its life to the simultaneous development of two other industrial/scientific innovations. One was the large-scale manufacture of illuminating gas, a by-product of which was tar. Second was the rise of systematic organic chemistry in the laboratory (see Chapter 13). The starting point occurred in 1843 when Justus von Liebig instructed one of his assistants to analyze some light coal oil sent to him by a former student, Ernest Sell.12 The assistant chosen by von Liebig to analyze Sell’s oil was Hofmann, who had just secured his doctorate at Giessen. Hofmann’s analysis revealed that coal-tar oil contained aniline and benzene, two substances that would themselves go on to become important industrially and commercially. Hofmann himself was initially more interested in teaching and research, and his interest in dyes grew only slowly. Because he was more interested in theory, it was the composition of dyes that mattered to him, and so his investigation of fuchsin, produced by the French and named after the fuchsia flower because its color was similar, was more systematic than anyone else’s. Giving the substance the scientific name of rosaniline, he was soon able to demonstrate its structural relation to aniline yellow, aniline blue, and imperial purple, all of which had recently been discovered.13 Because of these results, it now became possible to manipulate systematically the basic rosaniline structure, adding new functional groups that altered the shade produced. Hofmann himself manufactured triethyl and trimethyl rosaniline, two spectacular dyes marketed under the trade name “Hofmann’s violet.”14

  According to John Beer in his celebrated study of the German dye industry, these five dyes—mauve, fuchsin, aniline blue, yellow, and imperial purple—“were the most important coal tar colors that the young aniline dye industry produced…It was only five years since the industry had been founded and yet already twenty-nine dye manufacturing companies in western Europe were doing well enough to risk their reputation in international competition.” But Beer also shows that, over the next decade, while the German industry went from strength to strength, both the French and the British industries faded. “The French industry failed to prosper owing to a lack of trained technicians and the excessively theoretical approach of the École Polytechnique, whereas the British industry declined after 1873, partly because of the backward state of organic chemistry (which Hofmann had tried to rectify), an unwillingness by English capitalists to back research, and because the profession of chemist or engineer carried little prestige in intellectual circles or society at large.”15

  In marked contrast, the German and Swiss dye industries prospered by copying French and British processes—from Bessemer steel to waterproof paper. Scores of Germans learned their trade in Britain before returning to Germany. One important effect of this was to increase Germany’s cloth output as much as fivefold in woolens between 1842 and 1864, and fourfold in cotton between 1836 and 1861.16

  Two other factors contributed to the German and Swiss successes. These were the creation of polytechnic institutes and of factory research laboratories, which together supported the industry’s ever-increasing need for trained scientists and engineers.17

  The polytechnic institute (technische Hochschule) was modeled after the École Polytechnique that Napoleon founded in Paris for the training of mechanical, civil, and military engineers. It took the German Hochschulen quite some time to catch on and catch up, but during the 1860s and 1870s a concerted drive was begun to achieve for them full equality with the traditional universities. They were helped by the expansion of engineering owing to the advances in the understanding of electricity, magnetism, and the conservation of energy, the new forms of transport (railways and shipping in particular), and the other advances in higher mathematics, physics, and chemistry covered in previous chapters. Gradually, the matriculation standards were increased until they were on a par with the universities—so much so that, by 1900, the “Diplom Ingenieur” was the equal of a doctorate, and generally preferred by industry.18 The polytechnics were subseque
ntly allowed to confer the degree/title of “Doctor,” removing the stigma hitherto attached to “engineer.”

  The creation of the factory laboratory was an event “whose historical significance…lies in the changes it brought about in the techniques of scientific research—changes that accelerated man’s control over nature to such an extent that every major institution has since been affected.” Not only that but the cooperation of several specialists produced faster results than did individual inquiry “and so arose the research team, directed by a research director…Places could thus be found for impractical but gifted theorisers, for purely ‘gadget-minded’ but skilful experimenters and for those who were poor observers but could make links between newly discovered and old facts.” The German dye industry won its ascendancy “by wrenching thousands of little facts from nature by massed assault.”19

  Perhaps the great achievement of the laboratory was the way it transformed the coal-tar dye industry into the pharmaceuticals industry.20 Pharmaceuticals came into their own during the 1880s and 1890s, partly because it was now that anesthetics began to be generally used, chloroform and ether becoming profitable substances for the dye companies to manufacture. And partly because, with the conception of the germ theory of disease (see Chapter 20), there arose a need for antiseptics. These were almost all phenols, which the dye companies had for years been using as dyestuff components.21

  Antipyretics and analgesics were discovered much as mauve was—by accident in the search for something else. Dr. Ludwig Knorr at Erlangen was yet another of those looking for a quinine substitute when he found that the pyrazolone compound he had just manufactured had pain-killing and fever-lowering properties. Höchst, originally a dye company near Frankfurt, bought the rights to this drug in 1883, and it was quickly followed by similarly acting substances, of which the most notable were “Antifebrine” (1885), pure acetanilide, Phenacetin or p-ethoxyacetanilide (1888), dimethylaminoantipyrine, sold as “Pyramidon” by Höchst (1893), and aspirin (1898). Sedatives appeared in the 1890s—“Sulfonal” and “Trional” (Bayer) and “Hypnal” and “Valyl” (Höchst). The work of Koch and Pasteur on immunology (also Chapter 20), led Höchst into the large-scale production of serums and vaccines to treat such dreaded diseases as diphtheria, typhus, cholera, and tetanus.

  Following the lead at Höchst, and Bayer, another dye and drug company, at Elberfeld, Westphalia, interest in pharmaceuticals snowballed, with various firms employing bacteriologists, veterinarians, and other specialists.22 The new field of insecticides saw the building of laboratory-greenhouses where botanists and entomologists tested the killing power of pesticides. Photographic film, paper, and developing chemicals comprised another new branch of laboratory specialization. But the other two momentous processes that were discovered/invented at that time were nitrogen fixation, carried out at Ludwigshafen, and artificial rubber, developed at Bayer.23

  Nitrogen fixation was the original achievement, in 1902, of two Norwegians, Kristian Birkeland and Sam Eyde, who demonstrated that the oxides of nitrogen could be produced simply by heating air to a very high temperature by means of an electric arc. This was commercially feasible in Norway because hydroelectric power was so abundant and so cheap, but these conditions applied in few other locations. In the search for a more economical method of fixing nitrogen, Fritz Haber at Badische Anilin und Soda-Fabrik, near Mannheim, Germany’s lagest dye factory, found it in 1909 by synthesizing ammonia out of nitrogen and hydrogen under high pressure and temperature. Carl Bosch refined Haber’s process so that an ammonia plant was operating at Oppau near Ludwigshafen by 1913, establishing the firm’s pre-eminence in the fertilizer and munitions industries.

  A final sense in which the chemical/dye industry was important was its trade organization. After the unification of Germany in 1871, the dye manufacturers established an organization with an exceedingly long name, the Association for the Protection of the Interests of the German Chemical Industry—Registered Association. In existence since 1876, most people know it as the Verein and it was the Verein that was instrumental in the creation of the cartel and the chemical company IG Farben.24

  Cartels proliferated in the 1880s until, by 1905, the Ministry of the Interior counted 385 in Germany, 46 of them in the chemical industry. By 1908, the Bayer company was a member of twenty-five cartel agreements.

  The emergence of the cartel was a response to changed working conditions having to do with science. As commercial competition increased, profits declined to the point where capital and long-term investment and research could not be justified. As a result, the cartel fixed prices and market share. One of the first such controls occurred in 1881, fixing the price of alizarin (otherwise madder red) and allocating to each producer a certain fraction of the market. (Between 1869 and the date of the cartel, the price of alizarin had dropped from 270 marks per kilogram to 17.50.) This cartel didn’t last, partly because, as John Beer says, it was impossible for former rivals to bury the hatchet overnight, but also because the Swiss dye companies did not form part of the arrangement. Later cartels did work, mainly because, instead of being defensive, they discovered it was more effective to pool their patents and share profits in predetermined ratios. Former rivals now became more cooperative as they shared a bigger cake.25

  The German word for cartel is Interessengemeinschaft, or IG. The cartel of the color industry, IG Farben, would create an infamous furor after World War I.26

  FROM DYES TO DRUGS

  Just as Werner Siemens was the best example of the link between theoretical and applied science in Germany in the nineteenth century, so Friedrich Bayer and Johann Friedrich Weskott were the best examples of the important move from dyes into pharmaceuticals. Bayer, from a family of silk weavers in Barmen, was born in 1825, an only son surrounded by five sisters. Weskott’s family had moved to Barmen because the Wupper River provided excellent water supplies for their bleaching business. Both men were ambitious and in 1863 agreed to mount a joint venture, Friedrich Bayer & Company.27

  The business was a success, but it was only when the two founders died in the early 1880s and the reins were taken over by Carl Rumpff, Bayer’s son-in-law, that the firm’s direction began to change. Rumpff took Bayer public and with the capital raised he recruited a number of young chemistry graduates, one of whom was Carl Duisberg. Duisberg was charged with finding new areas where the company could expand.28

  It so happened that in the mid-to-late 1880s a new substance had appeared on the market in Germany, called Antifebrine, and this would open up for Duisberg a whole new world.

  In 1886, two Strasbourg doctors, Arnold Cahn and Paul Hepp, had a patient who suffered from intestinal worms and they sent off an order to a local pharmacy for naphthalene, the standard treatment. At the pharmacy, however, there was a mix-up and without knowing it, the two doctors were sent a different substance entirely, a preparation called acetanilide. This, an acetylation of aniline, was yet another by-product of coal tar, well known in the dye industry, but very definitely not a medicine and in fact never given to human beings before. Only when Cahn and Hepp noticed that this “medicine” was having no effect on the patient’s worms did they begin to ask questions. And what they observed, among other things, was that their patient’s temperature had fallen noticeably.29

  Paul Hepp’s brother, it so happened, was a chemist at a company called Kalle. By chance, Kalle manufactured acetanilide for the coal-dye industry and Cahn and Hepp approached them to see if the company would be interested in marketing acetanilide as an antipyretic. The Kalle directors liked the idea of an antipyretic, but they had a problem because the formula for acetanilide was well known: if their drug were successful, all their commercial rivals could join in the scramble for profits. That is when someone at Kalle had the bright idea to produce a simple, easy-to-remember name for the drug. Until then the drugs sold by pharmacists were invariably known by their complicated chemical names, even though most general practitioners were ignorant of the chemistry involved.
The point about Antifebrine, as the Kalle drug was called, was that it was much much easier to remember than acetanilide, exactly the same substance. The clever part lay in the fact that, under German law, a doctor’s prescription had to be followed exactly: if the prescription specified Antifebrine, Antifebrine it had to be.

  Watching this, Duisberg reasoned that if it could be done once, it could be done again. He cast his eye over a substance called para-nitrophenol, a waste product of the dye industry, that was similar to acetanilide; Bayer had 30,000 kilos of it going begging. Could this be exploited? He asked one of his men, Oskar Hinsberg, to look into it—and within a matter of weeks Hinsberg isolated a substance called acetophenatedine that, if anything, was an even more powerful antipyretic than acetanilide, with fewer side effects. Duisberg called it Phenacetin and, says Diarmuid Jeffreys, the origins of today’s global pharmaceutical business “can be traced back to that moment.”30

  Other successful drugs followed, so that when Rumpff died in 1890 and Duisberg took over, his first big decision was to create a separate pharmaceuticals division with a dedicated laboratory. Duisberg’s other clever move was to organize Bayer’s pharmaceuticals laboratory into two sections—the pharmaceuticals group, tasked with inventing new drugs, and the pharmacology group, which tested the drugs. This was a sensible form of quality control, much copied.31 It was in this environment that there was produced the most successful drug the world has known.