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Part of the book series: Chemists and Chemistry ((CACH,volume 19))

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Abstract

With these words, the British chemist Raphael Meldola, in his 1886 lecture before the Society of Arts in London, commenced a review of the influence of the German dye industry on industrial progress. That influence was hardly more tellingly invoked than by its impact on British chemists, particularly those with industrial experience, such as Meldola, who invented an important colorant, Meldola’s blue, similar to Caro’s methylene blue, when employed at Brooke, Simpson & Spiller of London. Meldola and others were not slow in recognising the weaknesses of the British dye-making firms, whose decline had started in the mid-1860s, around the time when Caro and other Germans returned to their homeland. It was a few years later, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, that German hegemony in dye manufacture became anchored in mastery of aromatic organic chemistry to an extent that was not to be achieved elsewhere. This at first took place through academic-industrial research alliances of the sort exemplified by the alizarin work of Caro, Graebe, and Liebermann during 1869–70, and formalised by Caro and Baeyer from 1874. The endeavour was soon woven into the fabric of factory life by the assignment of chemists to laboratories that were increasingly given over to research and development tasks.

I think it is desirable to make an attempt to show the inner mechanism by which chemical science has been and is being so successfully adjusted to commercial wants by our continental neighbours.

Raphael Meldola, 1886. 1

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References

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Reinhardt, C., Travis, A.S. (2000). The Industrial Research Laboratory. In: Heinrich Caro and the Creation of Modern Chemical Industry. Chemists and Chemistry, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9353-3_8

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