" When madder was introduced into France
it became a profitable crop and at one time half a million tons a year
were raised. A couple of French chemists, Robiquet and Colin, extracted
from madder its active principle, alizarin, in 1828, but it was not
until forty years later that it was discovered that alizarin had for its
base one of the coal-tar products, anthracene. Then came a neck-and-neck
race between Perkin and his German rivals to see which could discover a
cheap process for making alizarin from anthracene. The German chemists
beat him to the patent office by one day! Graebe and Liebermann filed
their application for a patent on the sulfuric acid process as No. 1936
on June 25, 1869. Perkin filed his for the same process as No. 1948 on
June 26. It had required twenty years to determine the constitution of
alizarin, but within six months from its first synthesis the commercial
process was developed and within a few years the sale of artificial
alizarin reached $8,000,000 annually. The madder fields of France were
put to other uses and even the French soldiers became dependent on
made-in-Germany dyes for their red trousers.
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