Toms River Read Free Page B

Tyrian purple when he was slain by Brutus in the senate house of Rome. It is also why, thirteen years later at the Battle of Actium, the sails of Cleopatra’s royal barge were dyed vivid purple.
    With the decline of the Roman Empire, the elaborate system of murex cultivation and dye production established by the Romans disappeared, and so did the purple hue itself. A millennium of grays, browns, and blacks followed. A new dye industry finally arose in the late Middle Ages, allowing Catholic cardinals to cloak themselves in scarlet drawn from the shells of tiny kermes insects and tapestry makers to weave with vivid reds from dyewood trees native to India and Brazil. 7 There were purples, too, mostly from lichens, but they were pale and faded quickly. The deep reddish purple of Caesar and Heracles, hue of power and wealth, monarch of colors, was no longer in the dye maker’s palette. It was gone, sustained only in legend.
    And then, suddenly, there it was, clinging tenaciously to the glass walls of eighteen-year-old William Henry Perkin’s test tubes, without a sea snail in sight. Within six months, Perkin had patented his dye-making process and resigned from the Royal College of Chemistry (over the objections of his mentor, Hofmann, who thought he was being reckless) to devote himself to the manufacture of the dye he first called Tyrian purple. He later switched to an appellation that wouldgo down in history as the first commercial product of the synthetic chemical industry: Perkin’s mauve, or mauveine. At first, Perkin and his brother, Thomas, made their dye in William’s top-floor workshop. Then they switched to the garden behind the family home, and finally to a factory on the outskirts of London alongside the Grand Junction Canal. Luckily for the Perkin brothers, light purple happened to be
très chic
in the salons of Paris and London in 1857 and 1858. Mauve, as the French called it, was the favorite hue of both Empress Eugénie of France and her close friend Queen Victoria of England. Perkin’s new dye was not only brighter than the mauves his French competitors laboriously produced from lichen, it was also much cheaper. Thanks to Perkin, any fashionable woman could afford to wear Eugénie’s favorite color, and by 1858 almost all of them did. The dye houses of Europe took notice, creating their own crash research programs in aniline chemistry and sending delegations to London to negotiate access to Perkin’s manufacturing secrets.
    Two rival dye makers from Basel, Switzerland, were among the closest observers of Perkin’s success. Johann Rudolf Geigy-Merian was among the fourth generation of Geigys in the dyewood business in Basel; his great-grandfather Johann Rudolf Geigy-Gemuseus had founded the firm one hundred years earlier in 1758. His competitor Alexander Clavel was a relative newcomer to Basel and was not even Swiss. Clavel was a Frenchman who resettled in Basel because that city, situated strategically on the Rhine River between Germany and France, was a thriving center of the textile trade. Geigy-Merian and Clavel shared a fascination with Perkin’s breakthrough in aniline chemistry and the cheaper, brighter dyes it produced. Their enthusiasm quickened with the discovery, in 1858, of the second great aniline dye. It was a bright red called fuchsine that could be produced even more cheaply than Perkin’s mauveine.
    To Geigy and Clavel, there seemed to be no reason not to try to out-Perkin Perkin, especially because the young Englishman had failed to secure patents in any countries except his own. Even if he had, it would not have mattered, since Switzerland did not enforce patents and would not recognize any chemical process as protectable intellectual property for another fifty years. (The resentful Frenchcalled Switzerland
le pays de contre-facteurs
, the land of counterfeiters, while the even angrier Germans called it
der Räuber-Staat
, the nation of pirates.) Geigy and Clavel did not bother trying