Anthony S. Travis

Between broken root and artificial alizarin: Textile arts and manufactures of madder

Summary The developments in preparing and fixing dyes, and in creating designs and patterns on cotton fabrics, were among the principal achievements of the European textile industry during the Industrial Revolution. The most widely used dyestuff was obtained from the root of the madder plant and was the basis of Turkey red and other colours. At first the dye was released by breaking open the root. By the middle of the sixteenth century it was available as a fine powder. This was much better suited to dyeing and hand block printing, and, later, Turkey red dyeing and dyeing of machine‐mordanted cloth. Isolation of the principal colorant, alizarin, was achieved in the 1820s, and the laboratory method suggested a means for preparing a more useful commercial product, known as garancine. It reduced the cost of madder prints, and permitted mixing with cheaper dyestuffs. The subsequent introduction of refined madder extracts enabled direct printing. The purer colorants were shortlived, however. Artificial alizari...

Decadence, Decline and Celebration: Raphael Meldola and the Mauve Jubilee of 1906

A century ago chemistry was the pre‐eminent academic and science‐based industrial pursuit, mainly as a result of the introduction of synthetic dyestuffs. The German dye‐making industry had just introduced synthetic indigo, following the longest and most expensive academic–technological campaign ever known and, as a follow up, novel fast vat dyes. The relevant coal tar, or aromatic, chemistry also heralded major breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals. The economic ramifications were enormous. It seemed appropriate then to celebrate the jubilee of the foundation of the dye industry by William Henry Perkin in 1856 with a major international event in London. Here the background to the jubilee is described and, by entangling key personalities in its organisation and their perspectives and opinions, I demonstrate how success in Germany and decline in England became one of the most compelling reasons for exploring issues related to the early debate over technical education in England.

High Pressure Industrial Chemistry: The First Steps, 1909–1913, and the Impact

In 1898, William Crookes’s Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science warned of an impending fertiliser crisis. As an active scientist, spokesman for chemistry (particularly as editor of Chemical News), and a one time director of the Native Guano Company, Crookes was well placed to make a strong plea for studies on the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. Not only might this solve the fertiliser problem, it might also bind academic chemistry and chemical industry closer together. Moreover, Crookes had already become engaged in the enterprise through his work in 1892 on an electric arc process that combined nitrogen with oxygen. With commercialization in mind, this had been taken up by Lord Rayleigh in 1897, and two years later in Manchester by McDougall and Howles. The impetus for this line of investigation was the great success of electrochemical production of aluminium and alkali.1

I. G. Farben in America: The Technologies of General Aniline & Film

The modern US chemical industry emerged during World War I in response to shortages of essential organic chemicals previously available mainly from Germany. This stimulated the development of technologies based on complex aromatic chemistry. The outcome was an advanced science‐based industry that embarked on diversification during the 1920s. However, access to German innovations was still needed and the Germans wished to regain dye markets lost during the war. This led to a singularly important merging of American and German interests, the General Aniline Works, later known as General Aniline & Film. Under German ownership in the 1930s, a unique strategy for control of production and research was implemented at General Aniline. Under US government ownership from 1942, General Aniline engaged in diversification based on pre‐war German innovations. The cessation of dyestuff manufacture in the 1970s at what had become the GAF Corporation represented a break with the past that was also taking place elsewhere in the USA. A half a century after its foundation the classical organic chemical industry had become an anachronism.

The Emerging Role of Titrimetry in Late Nineteenth-Century Industrial Problem Solving: The Example of Trace Analysis for Perchlorate in Chile Saltpetre

Abstract Trace analysis is usually associated with high-sensitivity analysis instrumentation. It became fully established from the 1960s following consensus among different groups of practitioners over protocols, reference materials, sensitivity, and accuracy and precision. As a consequence, wet chemical methods have been relegated to a secondary role, contrasting with their tremendous historical significance in detecting, identifying, and estimating small amounts of material. This is particularly relevant to the state-of-the-science analytical determinations stimulated by the effect of minor components in commodities of commercial importance. Here, I select a single example: attempts made during the 1890s to determine the amount of potassium perchlorate (KClO4) that occurs in Chile saltpetre (sodium nitrate). The application of titrimetry, particularly the adaptation of Volhards method for chloride analysis, was crucial in the efforts to estimate perchlorate in the nitrate used for explosives and to track the impact of perchlorate concentrations on certain important agricultural crops.

An Issue of Different Mentalities

The reasons why the industry of one nation is overtaken by the same industry of a rival nation are extremely complex, and have, so far, defied satisfactory explanations. In those cases where the outcompeted industry belongs to a country which is much further advanced economically such a development is often quite striking, even puzzling, and certainly begs for explanation. This presents a daunting challenge to economists and historians, who have not provided clear-cut reasons as to why industries surpass and are surpassed. Nevertheless their studies, reaching back to the earliest stages of industrialization, afford much valuable evidence that is amenable to analysis. Thus one group of historians has tackled the question of what brought about the so-called ‘British decline.’ This, it now appears, was not an absolute decline but a relative slowdown in economic growth as compared to the progress made by other nations.1 Furthermore, this slowdown was prevalent throughout British manufacturing industries, especially those based on new technologies such as the chemical, electrical and optical industries. Despite the fact that other sectors in Britain, particularly finance, continued to flourish, the relative decline in industrial production led to a substantial loss of national power and wealth, which was evident even before the close of the nineteenth century.

Globalising Synthetic Nitrogen: The Interwar Inauguration of a New Industry*

The most spectacular development in industrial chemistry during the early twentieth century concerned the capture of atmospheric nitrogen by the Haber-Bosch high-pressure ammonia process at the German chemical enterprise Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik (BASF), of Ludwigshafen. This firm, confident that its complex process could not be readily imitated, set out to dominate the global nitrogen fertiliser market. The response was the emergence of rival high-pressure ammonia processes in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan during the 1920s. This article is an historical appreciation of the settings in which several countries, often driven by concerns over national security, were encouraged to develop and adopt non-BASF high-pressure nitrogen capture technologies. Moreover, synthetic ammonia was at the forefront of large-scale strategic self-sufficiency and state sponsored programmes in three countries – Italy, Russia, and Japan – at the very same time when the newer technologies became available. As a result, the chemical industries of these nations, under the influences of fascism, communism, and colonial modernisation projects, began moving into the top ranks.

Aspects of Paper Tools in the Industrial-Academic Context: Constitutions and Structures of Aniline Dyes, 1860–1880

The synthetic, or “aniline,” dye industry, based on coal-tar hydrocarbons such as benzene, was established in England and France following William Henry Perkin’s 1856 invention of his mauve process. Almost from the moment of its inception the industry was declared to be a union of science and industry. However, though the union was strong, and was to remain so, it was invariably understood to imply a partnership in which industry relied on advances in academic research. Thus the highly relevant studies of August Wilhelm Hofmann on aromatic amino compounds and the advancement of Friedrich August Kekule’s benzene ring were projected as the outcomes of a well-developed tradition of academic enquiry in chemistry. This certainly enhanced the rapid expansion of the discipline, but it also masked the fact that industry played a considerable role in not only influencing the direction of academic research but also in establishing the efficacy of constitutional and structural formulae when used as “paper tools.” From the start, industrial interests stimulated studies into the classifications of, and interrelationships between, novel products. They also demonstrated convincingly the relevance of the benzene ring formula.

Ambitious and Glory Hunting ... Impractical and Fantastic

What made Heinrich Caro such a successful and prolific inventor? This is the principal question that we tried to answer as we followed his career, especially during the 1870s and early 1880s. Because of Caro’s artistic inclinations, we might with considerable justification describe this as his second most fertile period, when, as development chemist and then research director at BASF, he became the most important inventor of synthetic dyestuffs in the 19th century. Despite the surviving personal journals, diaries, and correspondence, and even self-congratulatory accounts, this is, however, one part of Caro’s life for which source material is thin, at least from his own perspective. Accordingly, other approaches to verisimilitude must be sought out. There is, fortunately, an important insight into Caro’s working style at that time. This derives from a retrospective and somewhat one-sided account written by his main professional rival at BASF, Carl Andreas Glaser, who joined the firm in 1869.

Modernizing Industrial Organic Chemistry: Great Britain between Two World Wars

Throughout World War I, the British chemical industry struggled with varying degrees of success to imitate the processes that it had previously neglected, but that had been mastered in Germany. Among these were the manufacture of refined aromatic intermediates and complex dyestuffs. The first British-made indigo was produced at the sequestered Ellesmere Port factory of the Hoechst dyeworks after “the task of working out the practical details was speedily solved by the united efforts of the chemical staff in the research laboratory and the engineering staff in the factory. Within six weeks large supplies of [the intermediate] phenylglycine were available. In November, 1916, the Union Jack was hoisted at Ellesmere Port, the plant was set into operation, and British synthetic indigo came on to the market in considerable amount, the quality generally admitted to be equal to that of the German product.”1