The Romance of Modern Chemistry

VALUABLE SUBSTANCES cene oil.” When each of these is further subjected to fractional distillation, the important compounds already mentioned are obtained in a state of comparative purity. All this clever sifting out of the constituents of coal tar was very interesting from the purely scientific point of view, and though that alone would never have made coal tar the highly important commercial product that it is to-day, still we must admit that the present realised value of coal tar goes back ultimately to those purely scientific researches carried on about the middle of last century. It is well to realise how much of our modern comfort and luxury is traceable to such researches, for there is sometimes a disposition on the part of the com- mercial world to scoff* at anything which cannot be shown to have an immediate use. This is a narrow view of the acquisition of knowledge. The history of the last half-century teaches us most emphatically that the advance of a chemical industry is secured not by the employment of practical men only, but by the co- operation of these with the skilled chemist. The appar- ently unpractical researches of the latter are, with the aid of the engineer, converted into practical manufactur- ing processes. We in Great Britain have been slow to appreciate the value of the trained chemist and the research laboratory; the result is that we have suffered in certain industries where these factors are essential to success. Yet it was an Englishman who made the discovery on which the whole coal-tar industry is founded. In 1856, the late Sir William Perkin, while still a lad of eighteen, discovered that when aniline was oxidised by dichromate of potash, a beautiful purple colouring matter, which we now speak of as mauve, was produced. A 285