BOY CHEMIST'S DISCOVERY.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 249, 20 October 1924, Page 9

BOY CHEMIST'S DISCOVERY.

START OF THE DYE INDUSTRY. Some seven! y yeare ago a boy chemist was trying during- his Easter holidays to get quinine by experimenting .:n a rough laboratory rigged up at his home in Shadwell. The first result was a red powder. He tried again vith aniline, a simpler material, and this time a messy black mass appeared :n his beaker. The boy purified the stuff, dried it, digested it with spirits of wine. Slowly the solution turned from black to brilliant mauve, and a new substance began to grow beneath his curious eyes. Well might he stare; he had stumbled upon one of the big discoveries of man. For he was William Henry Perkin. and this the first artificial dye ever made, the Perkin mauve of ISSG. To-day a precious bottle of the original colour is given proud place amongst the Wembley exhibits of the Brit'sh Dyestuffs Corporation, Ltd., an organisation to which last year Perkin's distinguished son, Professor W. H. Perkin, F.R.S., was appointed research adv.'-ser. Young Perkin, not yet turned 20, had the faith to set up works for the manufacture of his famous mauve. Besides mauve, these works were soon producing alizarine dahlia, aniline pink, magenta, Britannia violet, and Perkin's green. Research workers in Manchester, in. Huddersfield, and elsewhere joined "to make this the golden age oi the British dyestuffs industry, but, how tragically, it" was left to Germany to take up the industry and develop it, until before the war it yielded her an export trade of .€97.000,000 a year. What was the cause of that decline 5 It is attributed chiefly to the circumstances that in those days "there existed in Kngland no systematic school of organic chemistry.' .