The Matter Factory by Peter J. T. Morris

Author:Peter J. T. Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

96 Laboratoire de tests et d’essais, Solvay, Saint-Gilles, Brussels, 1889. This test laboratory was very different from the standard laboratories of the period, being more like an engineering workshop.

By 1850 the inorganic chemical industry had achieved a state of maturity and cohesion. Sulphuric acid could be made cheaply using the well-established lead chamber process, which in turn served the Leblanc soda industry and the fertilizer manufacturers. The products of the chemical industry were used by such major branches of industry as the metal producers and the textile industry, as well as soap and glass manufacturers. Yet in little more than a decade two young men, Ernest Solvay and William Henry Perkin (both born in 1838), had established the basis for a completely new chemical industry. Solvay, a Belgian entrepreneur, developed a new way of making soda by reacting brine with carbon dioxide and ammonia, which avoids the energy costs and excessive pollution of the Leblanc process (illus. 96). His process was introduced to Britain, the undisputed leader of the soda industry, by the German chemist Ludwig Mond. Perkin, while an assistant to Wilhelm Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, created the first useful synthetic dye, mauve, from the coaltar product aniline. Mauve soon passed out of use, as it was replaced by other new dyes, but the stage was set for the development of a new industry based on coal tar, hitherto a noxious waste product. A major breakthrough was the laboratory synthesis of the important red dye alizarin by Carl Graebe and Carl Liebermann in 1868, followed by the scaling up of the process to an industrial process by BASF and independently by Perkin. The success of synthetic alizarin enabled the German industry to consolidate its position while both France and Britain fell back. By the 1880s, the German dye companies were already exploring the possible manufacture of pharmaceuticals from coal tar.18

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