Toms River Read Online Free

to negotiate with Perkin; he had discussed his methods with enough people that they were now effectively in the public domain—in patent-free Switzerland, at least. By the end of 1859, Geigy and Clavel had each established his own thriving aniline dye manufacturing operation in Basel, within a few miles of each other on canals near the Rhine. In doing so, they set their firms on course to become two of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world—and eventual partners in a sprawling manufacturing operation in a small New Jersey town that had its own history of piracy: Toms River.
    Over the next ten years of frenetic activity along the Rhine, in Germany as well as Switzerland, the production of aniline dyes—purples, reds, and blacks first, then every color in the rainbow—transformed one small family firm after another into international colossi. By 1870, thanks to the new synthetic dyes, most of the companies that would dominate the chemical industry for the next century and a half had established themselves as global players. The list included Geigy, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa (an acronym for
Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation
, or the Corporation for Aniline Production), and the biggest of all, BASF, which stood for
Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik
, or the Baden Aniline and Soda Factory. Alexander Clavel’s company prospered, too, especially after he sold it in 1873. Eleven years later, the company took the name
Gesellschaft für Chemische Industrie im Basel
, Society for Chemical Industry in Basel, or Ciba for short. The third great Basel dye maker, Sandoz, jumped into the game soon afterward, in 1886.
    The companies’ success began with the appropriation of Perkin’s big idea, but it did not end there. An even more important decision was to follow the instinct of his mentor, Hofmann, by pulling apart coal tar and finding uses for all of its constituent parts, not just aniline. After the aniline dyes, derived from benzene, came magentas made from toluene, reds from anthracene, pinks from phenol, and indigos from naphthalene. These were all hydrocarbons, the abundant and inexpensive building blocks of organic chemistry. Hydrocarbonsproved extremely useful to the new world of chemical fabrication for the same reason that hydrogen and carbon are vital to the chemistry of life. When atoms of hydrogen and carbon form molecules, they tend to arrange themselves into durable structures of rings and long chains in which the atoms bond strongly via shared electrons. About four billion years ago, the strength of those hydrogen-carbon bonds allowed increasingly complex molecules—amino acids, DNA, and proteins—to evolve from the primordial soup, making life possible. Now, upon the stable platform of the hydrocarbon polymers in coal tar, chemists began to build a galaxy of new materials that were stronger, more attractive, and cheaper than what nature provided.
    Dyes came first, soon followed by paints, solvents, aspirin, sweeteners, laxatives, detergents, inks, anesthetics, cosmetics, adhesives, photographic materials, roofing, resins, and the first primitive plastics—all synthetic and all derived from coal tar, the fountainhead of commercial chemistry. (Coal tar shampoos and soaps came too—and are still available in very diluted form as approved treatments for psoriasis and head lice.) Germany’s Ruhr Valley, with its vast deposits of bituminous coal, became the industrial heartland of Europe and thus the world. The British satirical magazine
Punch
, which back in 1859 had lampooned “mauve measles” as a fashion epidemic that should be treated with a “dose of ridicule,” by 1888 was singing the praises of aniline chemistry, with only a tinge of sarcasm:
    Beautiful Tar, the outcome bright
    Of the black coal and the yellow gas-light,
    Of modern products most wondrous far,
    Tar of the gas-works, beautiful Tar! …
    Oil, and ointment, and wax, and wine,
    And the lovely colours called aniline;
    You can make