BOY CHEMIST’S DISCOVERY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 27 October 1924, Page 6

BOY CHEMIST’S DISCOVERY.

START OF TILE DYE INDUSTRY. Some seventy years ago a boy chemist, was trying during liis Easter holidays to get quinine by experimenting in a rough laboratory rigged up lat his home in Shad well. The first result was a red powder. He tried again with aniline, a simpler material and this time a messy black mass appeared in bis beaker. The boy purified the stuff, dried it, digested it with spirits of wine. Slowly the solution turned lrom black to brilliant mauve, and a new substance began to grow beneath his curious eyes. AVell might he stare; lie had stumbled upon one of the big discoveries of man. For he was Wih liani Henry Perkin, and this the first artificial dye ever made, the Perkin mauve of 18-56. To-day a precious bottle of: the original colour given proud place amongst the Wembley exhibits of the British Dyestuffs Corporation, Ltd., an organisation to which last year Perkin’s distinguished son, Prolessor W. H. Perkin, F.R.S., was appointed research adviser. Young Perkin, not yet turned 20, had the faith to set up works for the manufacture of his famous mauve. Besides mauve, these works isoon produced .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. of the British _ dyestuffs industry, but, how tragically, it v.'iis 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? It is attributed chiefly to the circumstances that in those days “there existed in England no systematic school of organic- che-rnistrv.”