RESEARCH AND THE COAL-TAR DYE INDUSTRY 253 



which is worthy of consideration here, namely that if the British 

 industry was to continue to progress and to hold its own with 

 the German firms there must be a sufficient supply of first-class 

 chemists trained in the methods of organic research. 



Unfortunately, however, organic chemistry was not even 

 recognised then as a subject for study at the universities, and 

 all attempts to obtain the sort of men required proved fruitless. 



It was not, in fact, until 1874 that the first chair of organic 

 chemistry was installed in Great Britain at Owens College, 

 Manchester. This state of affairs has been considerably 

 changed since then, but even to-day we are assured by Prof. 

 W. H. Perkin, jun. — a son of the discoverer of mauve, and 

 himself one of the most famous of living organic chemists — 

 that organic chemistry does not flourish in our universities 

 to anything like the extent it does at almost every German 

 university and technical school. 



Although, then, at the time Sir W. H. Perkin sold his works 

 in Greenford Green the British alizarine industry was well 

 established, the fact that, whilst the German firms were devoting 

 large sums to the investigation of everything even remotely 

 connected with the production of synthetic alizarine, in this 

 country continuous and systematic research work was not 

 undertaken to any extent, soon lost us the lead that had for 

 a second time been given to the British industry by its founder, 

 so that the German firms continuously gained ground on the 

 British concern, and in 1909 Germany was exporting close on 

 10,000 tons of alizarine and related dyes, covering by far the 

 greater portion of the world's demand. 



Although the technical production of alizarine, on account 

 of its magnitude, and the fact that it showed for the first time 

 that the chemist could beat nature at her own game, over- 

 shadowed almost everything else for the first decade of its 

 existence, nevertheless considerable advances were being made 

 simultaneously by chemists in other branches of the synthetic 

 dye industry. 



In 1 871 Professor Adolph von Baeyer produced two new 

 dyes, gallein and coerulein, which soon attained considerable 

 importance on account of their fastness, and a year or two 

 later in 1874 a new dye, eosin, was prepared simultaneously by 

 Caro and Emil Fischer by the action of bromine on fluorescein 

 (which had been discovered by Baeyer, but was unsuitedas a dye). 

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