Chapter XVIII
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WAR UPON THE DYESTUFF INDUSTRY
In Chapter II of this book it has been explained how the dyeing industry of the whole world was changed by the discovery and commercial preparation of the first aniline dyestuff, mauveine, in 1856, by the English chemist Perkin. Under his leadership the supremacy in this new industry was kept in England; but when he retired from the field the manufacture of dyestuffs was soon concentrated in Germany. For over forty years before the beginning of the Great War, the Germans had almost complete and absolute control over the whole color business, including many allied industries like the manufacture of organic chemicals, drugs, perfumes, flavoring matters and the like, derived originally from coal tar. In Germany were four or five great and splendidly equipped factories, and some ten or fifteen others of less importance, all thoroughly organized and working together most harmoniously under what would, in the United States, be called a most perfect specimen of a Trust. Opposed to them all over the world there could be found but a handful of comparatively small and unimportant firms in Switzerland, France, England and the United States—producing altogether not over about ten per cent of the output of their German competitors.
Compared to other industries the output of dyestuffs needed for the whole world’s consumption is not a very large one—some sixty or seventy million dollars a year all told; and it was freely boasted, and more or less accepted by the rest of the world, that “the dyestuff industry is a one-nation industry, and that nation is Germany!”
Rise of the German Dyestuff Monopoly.—The story of how this came about was once told the writer by Sir William Perkin, when he was in New York, in 1896, at the time of the “Coal Tar Color Jubilee,” the fiftieth anniversary of his famous discovery.
He said that in the early days, when he was running his plant near Manchester, the most dangerous competitors he had to face were the French. He described them as excellent chemists and keen, but fair-fighting business men; and the Germans, in those days, were far inferior to them in every way—in ability, in originality, and, above all, in honesty.
He went so far as to say that, for years before he left the business, he and other English chemists had entirely abandoned attempts to patent their discoveries in Berlin. He had found, by sad experience, that whenever he sent over an application for a patent on a new dyestuff, or new chemical compound of importance, the German Patent Office would at once call in, for consultation, the leading German chemists who were interested in that line of work. He would get request after request for more and more detailed information about every part of the process; and then, when they had got from him every bit of information that they could, they would grant the patent to some one of his German competitors, who, in many cases at least, had never even dreamed of the thing, until Perkin had sent his application to Berlin. In fact, he said the English and French chemists considered them as rank, bare-faced pirates, and none too successful pirates at that.
Two Germans however, in 1869, did work out the composition of alizarine, the dyestuff of madder, and published their discovery in the chemical journals. But while they discovered and patented one method for preparing this Alizarine from coal tar on a commercial scale, Perkin in England, and some dyestuff chemists in France discovered other methods equally good or perhaps better for producing the same identical color at less expense. So they still kept well ahead of the Germans even in that.
Soon after this, in 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out. At once the French and German factories closed, at any rate for any foreign trade, and as the cultivation of madder had by that time been abandoned, Perkin found that all the Turkey red for the whole Eastern market must be dyed with his Manchester alizarine. Orders came pouring in, and in order to keep up with the demand, it would be necessary for him to greatly increase the size of his plant, and to put back into it all his savings of the past fourteen or fifteen very profitable years.
This, he told me, he was unwilling to do. But, just at that moment, he was approached by a firm of Manchester business men, who had been supplying his works with some of the raw materials from coal tar (crudes and intermediates as they call them now), with an offer to buy his works and his interest in the business. He was perfectly frank and open with them, showed them his books, his profits for the past few years, his present orders and the rest, and after a little bargaining he sold out to them for a very fair price, which he immediately invested in the best of securities and on which he lived in comfort for the rest of his long and extremely happy life.
Ruin of the English Dyestuff Industry.—As soon as they had gained possession of his factory, the Manchester people began to pass word around among their friends, that they were going to show the whole world how to run a chemical industry. Perkin, they agreed, was indeed a clever fellow in his way, and undoubtedly a good chemist, but he was nobusiness man. They were going to run those works on good, practical, common-sense business lines, and they and their few friends whom they allowed to join them, boasted loudly and deeply of their expected profits. Their motto was the well-established one “Manufacture cheap and sell dear”—and they proceeded to follow it implicitly.