‘I thought that if I could be articled to a pharmacist I should be happy.’
In another telling of the story, Perkin again flattened the drama. ‘The possibility also of making new discoveries impressed me very much. I determined if possible to accumulate bottles of chemicals and make experiments.’
When he was thirteen he joined 600 other boys at the City of London School in a narrow street by Cheapside, not far from St Paul’s. It was a strict institution with painful punishments for misbehaviour, but its educational outlook was progressive. On his arrival, Perkin was delighted to learn that it was one of the few schools in the country to offer lessons in chemistry, a subject believed to have little practical use (and certainly less than Latin or Greek). The course was taught twice a week in the lunch-hour by a writing master called Thomas Hall, and Perkin persuaded his father to pay an extra seven shillings each term for the privilege. He skipped lunch to attend. ‘Thomas Hall noticed that I took a great interest in the lectures, and made me one of his helpers to prepare his lecture experiments. This was a wonderful lift for me . . . to work in the dismal place that was called a laboratory in that school.’
Hall suggested that Perkin might like to conduct some of the safer experiments at home, and helped him buy some glassware. Perkin’s father again agreed to pay for his son’s enthusiasms, although he made it clear he wished him to become an architect. Chemistry was fascinating, but there was no money in it.
Outside school, Perkin attended chemistry talks given by Henry Letheby at the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, and both Letheby and Thomas Hall suggested to Perkin that he write to their friend Michael Faraday requesting permission to attend his monumental lectures at the Royal Institution. Faraday replied in his own hand, an act that delighted Perkin greatly, and so it was that on Saturday afternoons a fourteen-year-old boy found himself the youngest spectator of the latest developments in the peculiar science of electricity.
A few years before, the leading German scientist Justus Liebig had had some damning news for the delegates to the British Association meeting in Liverpool in 1837. ‘England is not the land of science,’ he declared. ‘There is only widespread dilettantism, their chemists are ashamed to be known by that name because it has been assumed by the apothecaries, who are despised.’
In contrast, Liebig’s teaching laboratory at the University of Giessen was the envy of all experimental chemists, and men travelled hundreds of miles to engage in what their own countries believed to be an unrewarding pursuit. There were chairs in chemistry at both Oxford and Cambridge, but the idea that the subject should be taught and learnt in the laboratory was unheard of; students were merely taught chemical history as part of a wider science course. At the University of Glasgow, a man named Thomas Thomson was probably the first to open up his laboratory to his students for practical instruction, and Thomas Graham, singled out by Liebig as a rare example of a forward-looking scientist, did the same at the city’s Andersonian Institution in 1830. At the time of Perkin’s birth there was no college anywhere in the country dedicated to the study of chemistry.
Liebig was an inspirational speaker, and it was his British lecture tour in the early 1840s which convinced men of influence that London needed a specialist chemical school (Liebig met the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, who expressed personal interest due to his family’s involvement in calico printing). There were plans to establish the Davy College of Practical Chemistry within the Royal Institution, but when these foundered, Sir James Clark, the Queen’s physician, Michael Faraday and the Prince Consort, for years a keen sponsor of scientific research, established a private subscription to finance the Royal College of Chemistry, raising some £5,000, and counting both Peel and Gladstone among its contributors.
The College opened temporary laboratories just off Hanover Square in 1845, and moved a year later to a permanent site at the south side of Oxford Street. The building was soon full with twenty-six students, and its size dictated that lectures be held at the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street. It was here that Perkin’s teacher Thomas Hall first came to hear the young director of the college, August Wilhelm von Hofmann.
Hofmann was born in Giessen in 1818, and first studied mathematics and physics before taking chemistry with Liebig. His appointment at the Royal College was widely favoured by Prince Albert, not least because he believed that Hofmann would make advances directly beneficial to agriculture. And there was another reason: in the summer of 1845, the Queen and Prince Albert visited Bonn for the unveiling of the monument to Beethoven. Queen Victoria noted the occasion in her diary, and recorded what happened afterwards. ‘We drove with the King and Queen [of Prussia] to Albert’s former little house. It was such a pleasure for me to be able to see this house. We went all over it, and it is just as it was . . .’ The lack of alteration was down to August Hofmann, who now lived there and occasionally conducted small chemical experiments in one of the rooms.
Thomas Hall believed that Perkin should enrol at the Royal College at fifteen, but there was severe opposition from Perkin’s father. Why couldn’t William be more like his older brother Thomas? Thomas was training to be an architect. ‘My father was disappointed,’ Perkin recorded years later. But Hall persuaded his father to meet Hofmann, who may have beguiled him with the exotic possibilities of benzene and aniline.
‘He had several interviews with my father,’ Perkin noted. ‘And the end of it was that I went to study chemistry under Dr Hofmann.’
That was in 1853. Within five years, Perkin had made his fortune.
Chapter Three
Floating in the Air
Wandered in the town, to the Museum and
Zoo . . . Reconstructions of Hausa and Sanghay villages – combination of indigo and pale calabash. Hunchback boy with staff and bowl and mauve purple jumper stretched like a landscape over his totally deformed body . . . A restaurant in a garden. I drank a beer on a red spotted cloth-covered table. Mosquitoes bit the hard parts of my fingers.
Bruce Chatwin in Niger, 1971, from Photographs and Notebooks
When Perkin left the Royal College every evening and walked along Oxford Street, his journey was illuminated by gas light. London was ablaze with gas: houses, factories and streets had been lit this way since the beginning of the century, and Perkin’s laboratory work had begun to rely on gas for other fiery uses.
But this demand brought some terrible problems. Gas derived from the distillation of coal, and millions of tons were processed each year to meet demand. The process – which involved the highly combustible method of heating coal in closed vessels without oxygen – also yielded several useless and dangerous by-products: foul-smelling water, various sulphur compounds and a large amount of oily tar.
For many years these were regarded as waste; the problem was not how to utilise them but how to get rid of them. The sulphur was found to be removable with lime and sawdust, while the gas-water and tar were abandoned in streams, where they poisoned the water and killed the fish. Anyone who requested any of these by-products was given them without charge in huge barrels. Some hopeless experiments were conducted with them, and then they were again thrown away into streams. But gradually, in the years leading up to Perkin’s birth, new uses were uncovered.
The gas-water was found to be rich in ammonia, and the sulphur compounds would be used in the manufacture of sulphuric acid. In Glasgow in the 1820s, Charles Macintosh found a use for the coal tar, developing a method of waterproofing cloth. He used it to prepare a special solution of rubber, applied it to two pieces of coat fabric, and called it a raincoat, but other people soon began calling it a macintosh. It was also used as a protective coating on timber, and was widely employed on the new railway system. Its combination with creosote also afforded a thick coating for wood
