Chapter One

      The Celebrity

      Despite his immense wealth, Sir William Perkin seldom travelled abroad. He had visited friends and colleagues in Germany and France, and had once been to the United States, but he found the experience tiring and quickly grew weary of sightseeing. Eight days to cross the Atlantic with nothing to do but read and look at the waves. Sometimes the sea made him nauseous.

      In the autumn of 1906, at the age of sixty-eight, he resolved to give travelling another chance. On 23 September he boarded RMS Umbria, bound for New York, taking with him his wife Alexandrine and two of their four children. He spent much of the voyage writing in his first-class cabin; he had a speech to give a few days after arrival, and some letters to attend to. He had recently received a request from a chemist in Germany asking for details of his early life for a lecture he hoped to deliver to his students. Perkin was famous now, and each post seemed to bring enquiries about his career and invitations to celebrations.

      He wrote in a modest and unflowery style. ‘The first public laboratory I worked in was the Royal College of Chemistry in Oxford Street, London, in 1853–1856.’ It wasn’t like the great electric laboratories of today, he noted, with your huge booming furnaces. ‘There were no Bunsen burners – we had short lengths of iron tube covered with wire gauze.’ It was a grey place. There were many nasty explosions.

      As the Umbria pushed on, newspapers throughout North America excitedly carried the news of Perkin’s imminent arrival. ‘Famous Chemist Visits Here,’ announced the Santa Ana Evening Blade. ‘British Invade City Hall,’ said the New York Globe. In most cities the very fact that Perkin had boarded a steamship was enough to make the front page, but the coverage was nothing compared to that greeting his arrival.

      Perkin and family disembarked in New York, where they were met by Professor Charles Chandler of Columbia University. There is a photograph of them all at the quay in their heavy tweeds and woollen coats, and they don’t look particularly thrilled to be there. I’m weary, Perkin told one reporter who met him at Professor Chandler’s apartment in midtown Manhattan. A few days later, the New York Herald racked up a list of his achievements, and proclaimed: ‘Coal Tar Wizard, Just Arrived in Country, Transmuted Liquid Dross To Gold’. In this story, Perkin had been elevated to the status of scientific saint, his merits placed alongside those of Watt and Stephenson, Morse and Bell.

      Everyone wanted to meet him. His schedule was frantic. On Saturday night there would be a big dinner in his honour at Delmonico’s, New York City’s premier banqueting hall. But before then, there was some flesh-pressing and some sightseeing. On Monday he would be the guest of George F. Kunz, the gem expert at Tiffany’s, who said he would escort him and his family around various stores of interest to chemists. The Perkins would then visit the zoo, New York Botanical Garden and the Museum of Art. The next day they were off to the country home, in Floyd’s Neck, Long Island, of William J. Matheson, a representative of a large German chemical firm. On Wednesday he would spend time with the mayor of New York, George B. McClellan. On Thursday, H. H. Rogers would take them on his yacht for a sail up the Hudson, and the next day it would be the Laurel Hill Chemical Works. The Sunday after the banquet there would be a leisurely evening at the Chemists’ Club on 55th Street.

      Then there was Boston for more of the same, and then Washington DC, where Perkin was due to meet President Roosevelt. The party was then booked in at Niagara Falls, followed by Montreal and Quebec City, and then back to the United States for honorary degrees from Columbia in New York and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

      Like many tourists before and since, Perkin found that Boston reminded him of English cities, and he especially enjoyed his trip out to Charlestown to see the battleship Rhode Island. ‘I am greatly looking forward to meeting your President,’ Perkin said as he boarded the Colonial Express bound for Washington. ‘It is a certain honour,’ Perkin told everyone who asked all about his great discovery. ‘I was in the laboratory of the German chemist Hofmann,’ he explained, his comments recorded a day later in the Little Rock Gazette. ‘I was then eighteen. While working on an experiment, I failed, and was about to throw a certain black residue away when I thought it might be interesting. The solution of it resulted in a strangely beautiful colour. You know the rest.’

      About 400 people gathered at Delmonico’s at 7 p.m. One reporter present noted how ‘If burial in Westminster Abbey is the highest of posthumous honours in the Anglo-Saxon world, we doubt whether a famous Englishman can receive a surer proof of his living apotheosis than when he is entertained by a company of representative Americans at Delmonico’s.’

      The banqueting room, a place of huge chandeliers and gilt mirrors, had been got up in English, American and German flags, and the top men (no women) from all walks of the chemical and new industrial worlds sat around forty-four tables drinking Louis Roederer Carte Blanche and telling stories about booming business and fantastic inventions. At least half of them wore fashionable moustaches. Their menu cards had been embossed, each carrying a brightly coloured tassel and a picture of Perkin looking like a benevolent country clergyman. The gold inscription read, ‘Dinner in honour of Sir William Henry Perkin by his American friends to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his discovery’.

      On everyone’s plate lay a facsimile copy of a London patent from 1856. ‘Now know ye,’ it proclaimed, ‘That I, the said William Henry Perkin, do hereby declare the nature of my said Invention, and in what manner the same is to be performed . . .’

      Before the first course arrived, which was oysters, those disappointed with the seating arrangements took to reading the full details of Perkin’s invention. The chemists among them may have been surprised at its simplicity, but they would have conceded that fifty years ago they would have been astonished.

      I take a cold solution of sulphate of aniline, or a cold solution of sulphate of toluidine, or a cold solution of sulphate of xylidine, or a mixture of any one of such solutions with any others or other of them, and as much of a cold solution of a soluble bichromate as contains base enough to convert the sulphuric acid in any of the above-mentioned solutions into a neutral sulphate. I then mix the solutions and allow them to stand for ten or twelve hours, when the mixture will consist of a black powder and a solution of a neutral sulphate. I then throw this mixture upon a fine filter, and wash it with water till free from the neutral sulphate. I then dry the substance thus obtained at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade, or 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and digest it repeatedly with coal-tar naphtha, until it is free from a brown substance which is extracted by the naphtha. I then free the residue from the naphtha by evaporation, and digest it with methylated spirit . . . which dissolves out