SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



The heat represented in its latent form in the growing 

 plants, and the light transformed into their brilliant colors, 

 were locked within the lumps of coal ready to be pro- 

 duced actively whenever man should have found the way 

 to do so. It took him all but the last two centuries to 

 discover the relatively obvious fact that the heat could 

 be extracted from this coal ; and all but the last half of 

 the last century to unravel the complicated process of 

 restoring the colors buried, and apparently lost, so many 

 centuries before. That he has done so in scores of in- 

 stances is one of the greatest triumphs of modern 

 chemistry. What other achievement of man savors so 

 much of the miraculous as this creation of hundreds 

 of attractive colors and tints from this repulsive black 

 refuse of grimy coal-heaps ? 



The conquest had its beginning in 1826 when Un- 

 verdorben discovered aniline among the products of the 

 dry distillation of indigo; and when Runge eight years 

 later proved the existence of the same substance in 

 coal-tar. The first aniline color was not produced, 

 however, until 1856, when the English chemist, Perkin, 

 produced "Perkin's violet." But this discovery was 

 somewhat in the nature of an "accident," scientifically 

 speaking, and the color could not be produced as a com- 

 mercial commodity. It required Kekule's promulgation 

 of the theoretical constitution of benzine, in 1867, to 

 give the chemists a basis for accurate synthetic work. 

 Until this time the discoveries had been empiric in 

 character; but now the scientific production of colors, 

 of greater or less value commercially, followed very 

 rapidly. The most revolutionary discovery came in 



