430 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 7 



However, shortly after his twelfth birthday, William found a friend 

 who showed him some chemical experiments and as a result he 

 acquired a keen interest in chemistry. He was fascinated by chemical 

 reactions and especially by the beautiful forms of crystals and de- 

 cided that if it were at all possible he would become a chemist. By 

 the time he was 13 he was accumulating bottles of chemicals and 

 performing experiments at home. Just about this time he was sent 

 to the City of London School, one of the very few schools in England 

 where science was taught. Even there, however, instruction in science 

 was informal, for it had no place in the regular curriculum. The edu- 

 cated man was marked by his knowledge of the classics rather than of 

 science and "stinks" was the name reserved for chemistry. 



The man who taught science at this school was a Mr. Thomas Hall 

 who had been a pupil of the great chemist, August Wilhelm Hof maim. 

 Hall's teaching of science was informal and was a sideline to his regu- 

 lar and full schedule of conventional classical subjects. Twice a week 

 during the dinner hour science instruction was more or less "sneaked 

 in," and it was in this way that young Perkin obtained his first system- 

 atic knowledge of chemistry. His assiduity attracted the attention of 

 his teacher, who invited the boy to become his laboratory assistant. 

 William found chemistry so interesting that he skipped many meals in 

 order to have time for experiments. When he was 14 his instructor 

 suggested that he write to Michael Faraday, then lecturing at the 

 Royal Institution, for permission to attend the lectures. Faraday 

 graciously consented and sent a ticket that admitted the youth to the 

 Saturday afternoon sessions. 



By this time Hall felt that his pupil was ready for more advanced 

 studies and urged him to enter the Royal College of Chemistry. The 

 boy's father objected since he still wanted his son to become an archi- 

 tect and he could see no prospects for a decent living in chemistry. 

 In the course of several personal visits to the elder Perkin, Hall ob- 

 tained parental permission for the boy to choose his own career. Thus 

 at the age of 15 he enrolled for study under Hofmann, a student of 

 Liebig, who, during 20 years as director of the Royal College of 

 Chemistry, trained the leading British chemists of the Victorian Era. 

 William Crookes, of Crookes' tube fame, was an assistant in the Col- 

 lege and he gave the new student his first task — that of studying 

 the reactions of metals. Perkin soon completed the ordinary course 

 of analysis but was not content to become a mere analyst. He wanted 

 to do research, and it was not long before he attracted the attention 

 of Hofmann himself who was then investigating the production of 

 organic bases from hydrocarbons by the reduction of nitroderivatives. 

 He gave Perkin the job of trying this method on anthracene. The 

 first problem was to extract this substance from coal-tar pitch, but 



