How a classic specialty chemical market works: the synthetic dye industry: The birth of an industry, 1856 to the 1870s

2.1 Perkin's mauve needed a factory, an intermediate supply and a customer

In 1856 William Henry Perkin, a student of the German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, was trying to make quinine, the anti-malaria drug, in a home laboratory. Kent describes how he oxidised aniline with potassium dichromate, got a black sludge, and found that alcohol pulled a brilliant purple out of it. Against his professor's advice he left college, and with his father and brother opened a works at Greenford Green near London in 1857.

He faced three separate problems. The first was the molecule, which he had. The second was the inputs. No one sold nitrobenzene or aniline, the intermediates between coal tar and his dye, so he had to make them. Nitric acid strong enough was not on the market, so he used sodium nitrate with sulphuric acid. He made nitrobenzene in iron vessels, which had never been done; laboratories used glass. These production tricks made the dye cheap enough to sell, though at first it traded at the price of platinum.

The third problem was the customer. British dyers were wary. The breakthrough came in France, where the fashion houses of Paris and Lyon were the least conservative dyers; the French named the colour mauve and by 1859 it was a craze in Britain too. Mauve took to silk but not cotton. Perkin and Pullar found a tannin treatment that fixed it to cotton, and in 1862 Perkin and the Frenchman Schultz patented a mordant that opened up calico printing. Records show Perkin doing what would now be called technical service on factory floors in Glasgow, Bradford and Macclesfield.

Mauve itself was soon beaten by other dyes, but the pattern of molecule, intermediates and application service set the template for the whole industry.

• Kent (2012), Ch 13 Dye Application, Manufacture of Dye Intermediates and Dyes · pdf p. 485
• Murmann (2003) · pdf pp. 26, 48, 118-119, 133-135, 263, 268

2.2 The first firms: Britain leads, France invents, Germany copies, Switzerland follows

For the first eight years Britain was home to the largest dye firms. Perkin & Sons was joined by Simpson, Maule & Nicholson (SM&N), whose three founders had all studied under Hofmann and whose works was reported in the mid-1860s to be the largest dye and intermediate plant in the world. Read Holliday of Huddersfield opened the industry's first foreign factory, in Brooklyn, New York, in 1864.

France supplied many of the early inventions. The brilliant red fuchsine (also called magenta or aniline red) appeared there in 1858, and the firm La Fuchsine and Renard Freres were leaders. Because red was in far greater demand than purple, fuchsine drew in a crowd of makers. France also had the only true shakeout of firms, between 1862 and 1872, and its research centre faded with its industry by the mid-1880s.

German firms began as copiers. Jager of Barmen made fuchsine by 1858, within a year of Perkin. Friedrich Bayer and the dyer Friedrich Weskott first tried making fuchsine on a kitchen stove and were on the market in 1863. Hoechst followed. BASF, founded in 1865 by men from the coal-tar side, was designed from the start to make its own acids, alkalis, intermediates and dyes. By 1864 Germany had eleven fuchsine plants to Britain's five. The difference was not talent alone: there was no effective patent protection across the German states, so anyone could copy.

Switzerland sat inside the German-speaking university world, and the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich trained dye chemists for both Swiss and German firms. Swiss makers also copied German dyes, much to German annoyance, until Switzerland passed a chemical patent law in 1907. By 1913 Swiss output was 10,000 tonnes, second only to Germany.

In 1863 Hofmann confidently predicted that Britain would become the greatest colour-producing country in the world.

• Murmann (2003) · pdf pp. 32-33, 58, 68, 101, 113-114, 122-127, 130-133, 137, 141-142, 208, 271

2.3 A market that grew fortyfold and swept away natural dyes

The new industry grew very fast. Between 1862 and 1913 world output rose by 3,800% in value. Because prices kept falling, volume rose even faster: from about 3,500 tonnes in 1871 to about 162,000 tonnes in 1913, roughly 46 times. Murmann compares the falling prices to personal computers in his own day.

The growth came largely at the expense of natural dyes. Madder grown in Europe was worth about 60 million marks a year in the 1860s; within a little more than a decade of synthetic alizarin in 1869, madder farming had gone. Before synthetic indigo, about 2,800 firms in India extracted the dye from the indigo plant. India's indigo exports fell in value from £3.57 million in 1896 to £225,000 in 1911, and by 1914 Germany made 95% of the indigo the world used. Only one natural dye, logwood, is still used today, and only a little.

The table below shows the world market on the eve of the First World War. Germany made 135,000 of 162,000 tonnes, or 83%, and exported about 85% of what it made. Britain, home of the world's biggest textile industry, used 23,000 tonnes but made only 5,000, so it imported about 78% of its needs. The United States used 26,000 tonnes and made 3,000, importing 88%. China was the largest single market by tonnage and India took 8,000 tonnes.

The market was global almost from the start. Dyes have a high value per kilogram, unlike sulphuric acid, so freight hardly mattered. A firm's real reach was set by its ability to sell and support customers abroad.

• Murmann (2003) · pdf pp. 49, 61-62, 138, 145, 234, 280-281

See it in the table

Check your understanding

Why did Perkin have to make nitrobenzene and aniline himself?

In 1864 Germany had eleven fuchsine plants and Britain five. What does Murmann see as the main reason?

Using the 1913 table, roughly what share of its own dye needs did Britain import?