The Romance of Modern Chemistry

HOW MAN COMPETES WITH NATURE ancient product of the vegetable world has been un- ceremoniously hustled out of the market by the artificial dye. The latter can now be produced more cheaply than the natural alizarin, with the result that the cultivation of the madder plant has almost ceased. The magnitude of the trade revolution thus due to the synthetic production of a natural dye may be gauged from the fact that for ten years previous to the discovery the value of the annual import of madder into Great Britain averaged ^1,000,000, while ten years later the value had sunk to <£"24,000. All this meant unem- ployment and privation to the people engaged in the cul- tivation of the madder plant, but indeed it is frequently the case that the advance of science, although beneficial to society as a whole, involves suffering to many individuals. In explaining the synthesis of carbamide we were at pains to follow the successive steps by which it is possible to build up the final compound from the component elements. It must not be supposed, however, that the manufacturer of alizarin starts with the elements of which that substance is composed. As a matter of fact, the chief raw material of alizarin is anthracene, a hydrocarbon which is extracted from coal tar. It has been shown that this hydrocarbon can be synthesised in the laboratory, and as everything else used in the manufacture of alizarin can be similarly built up from inorganic materials, it follows that we have here an instance of the artificial formation of a complex natural product The manufacturer, how- ever, who has to consider the price of raw material and the cost of labour, starts with some other natural pro- duct, in this case anthracene, which is at once cheap and easily obtained. Natural alizarin has gone down before the artificial 254