Blogs and book

When Caesar conquered our British ancestors he found
them tattooed with woad, the native indigo. But the chief source of
indigo was, as its name implies, India. In 1897 nearly a million acres
in India were growing the indigo plant and the annual value of the crop
was $20,000,000. Then the fall began and by 1914 India was producing
only $300,000 worth! What had happened to destroy this profitable
industry? Some blight or insect? No, it was simply that the Badische
Anilin-und-Soda Fabrik had worked out a practical process for making
artificial indigo.
That indigo on breaking up gave off aniline was discovered as early as
1840. In fact that was how aniline got its name, for when Fritzsche
distilled indigo with caustic soda he called the colorless distillate
"aniline," from the Arabic name for indigo, "anil" or "al-nil," that is,
"the blue-stuff." But how to reverse the process and get indigo from
aniline puzzled chemists for more than forty years until finally it was
solved by Adolf von Baeyer of Munich, who died in 1917 at the age of
eighty-four.


Pages:
106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130