Crystal Palace in Hyde Park hosted the most impressive display of booming mechanics that anyone had seen, suggested that progress would be forged merely by the continued application of cheap and copious steam power.
The problem with studying pure chemistry, on the other hand, was that the endeavour seldom produced anything remotely useful.
In the annual report of the Royal College published in 1849, August Hofmann revealed that one of his most cherished ambitions was to show how well the study of chemistry could produce the artificial synthesis of natural substances. He admitted that this involved an uncertain mix of supremely patient application and great good fortune. Indeed, Hofmann and his students were simply grasping for great things in the manner of skilled artists painting with untried materials. ‘Perhaps we will be lucky,’ Hofmann said.
By about 1830 it was becoming clear that all the substances isolated from plant and animal sources contained the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and often nitrogen and sulphur (the science of organic chemistry is essentially the chemistry of carbon compounds). A simple chemical compound was described by the combination of its elements. At school, Perkin would have learnt the basics: the elements were represented by chemical symbols such as C (carbon), H (hydrogen), O (oxygen) and S (sulphur), where an element is a substance that combines with others to form compounds, but which cannot be broken down into any simpler substance itself. When two or more elements combine, it is the atoms of the different elements that join together, forming molecules. Each molecule of a compound contains the same number of atoms as every other molecule of the compound. In the most rudimentary example, H2O, the chemical symbol for water, thus contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. It was not yet known that in some elements – such as the oxygen in the air – the atoms can join together to make molecules without other elements being involved.
One substance Hofmann wished to make in the laboratory was quinine. Quinine was the only treatment found to be effective against malaria, and in the middle of the nineteenth century malaria was a problem that determined the size and prosperity of an empire.
Malaria is an ancient disease, and perhaps the ruin of ancient civilisations. The fortunes of Rome and the Campagna have been tracked against its prevalence. It became widespread after the Second Punic War at about 200 BC, and declined during the days of the Roman Empire until the end of the fourth century AD. But it then reached epidemic proportions, and hampered colonisation until its decline shortly before the Renaissance.
The term malaria – the misleading literal translation of the Italian ‘bad air’ – was probably first used in English in the 1740s, when Horace Walpole described ‘a horrid thing called the mal’aria that comes to Rome every summer and kills one’. Before this, its presence was defined by the catch-all diagnosis of fever or ague.
In Hofmann’s day, malaria was the grave concern not just of Asia and Africa. France, Spain, Holland and Italy were still intensely malarious, although, as elsewhere in this period, it was not always possible to define precisely how many deaths were due to other fevers such as cholera. It was common in Russia and the Western Territory of Australia, and in America the disease was prevalent in the swamplands of the Carolinas, Florida and New Orleans. During the Civil War, malaria was the chief cause of death in the Southern States, and there were hundreds of thousands of cases in New York and Philadelphia – the situation only improving with the clearing and development of land.
In England, where, it was believed, malaria had been responsible for the deaths of James I and Cromwell, the disease was still rampant in the 1850s.The worst areas were the Cambridgeshire Fens and Essex marshes, and in Great Expectations Dickens depicted the marsh agues around Pip’s home in Medway, Kent. Between 1850 and 1860, tens of thousands of people were admitted to St Thomas’s Hospital diagnosed with ague (malarial fevers), and in 1853 it accounted for almost 50 per cent of all admissions.
British imperialists found malaria to be the greatest hindrance to colonisation. In Kilimane, for example, David Livingstone found the mosquitoes ‘something dreadful’, and described how he ‘had an opportunity of observing the fever acting as a slow poison. ‘[Victims] felt out of sorts only, but gradually became pale, bloodless and emaciated, then weaker and weaker, till at last they sank more like oxen bitten by tsetse than any disease I ever saw.’
In India, where vast swathes of the country remained uncultivated because of malaria, the British Army were sending back reports of human devastation. It was suggested that the disease acted as a natural form of population control. Amongst adults, about 25 million struggled with the chronic nature of the disease, and about 2 million died annually. Horrified army officers reported grim symptoms. Patients suffered from chills, convulsions, burning temperatures, muscle pains, nausea, vomiting and delirium. Many died in a coma; many more found that their illness returned intermittently. The British naturally blamed the natives, despite the fact that their own policy of serfdom and the land policy of the East India Company compounded the severity of the problem.
Even in the 1850s, no one was sure what caused this disease. There were plenty of theories, most involving marshlands and airborne infection, but, despite vague hunches from Livingstone and others no one had yet made the scientific link with mosquitoes.
Treatment for malaria was more straightforward, although often difficult to secure. Up until 1820, when the French chemist–pharmacists Pelletier and Caventou isolated quinine from cinchona bark, many physicians still proffered such remedies as three days of blood-letting, or treatment with mercury, or three bottles of brandy. The superstitious believed that carrying a spider in a nutshell, or eating one, would cure the disease.
But this was the era of the new alkaloid. Cinchona bark (and roots and leaves) contained not only quinine (named after the Spanish spelling of ‘kina’, the Peruvian word for bark), but also cinchonine, and in the next two decades, two more alkaloids were isolated from the tree, quinidine and cinchonidine. Each had a slightly different molecular structure, and none was quite as effective against malaria as pure quinine (but nonetheless sold as such). In the same period, the two Frenchmen also isolated the strychnine from St Ignatius’s beans, and other chemists found other alkaloids – caffeine in coffee beans and codeine in opium.
Quinine was in limited supply, and thus expensive. The cinchona tree is about the size of a plum tree with leaves like ivy, and was found almost exclusively in Bolivia and Peru. By 1852, the Indian Government was spending more than £7,000 annually on cinchona bark, and £25,000 for supplies of pure quinine. The East India Company was spending about £100,000 annually. Predictably, this was not intended to treat the poor, and still bought nothing like the 750 tons of bark required by the British army in India alone.
The clamour for quinine from the great European imperialists was immense, and Britain and Holland mounted costly attempts to grow cinchona seeds in India and Java; the British tried to grow the tree for commercial use in Kew Gardens. The initial planting missions failed, as explorers would often plant the wrong seeds in the wrong place. Some did get rich on the disease, the most notorious being John Sappington who marketed Dr Sappington’s Pills in the Mississippi valley by persuading local churchmen to ring their bells in the evening to remind people to take them. Sappington had capitalised on the one fundamental property of quinine – its scarcity – and had added other worthless substances to his pills to make his supplies go further. In London and Paris, the cost of bark was about £1 per pound, but as it took approximately 2 lb of bark to treat each person, only the well-off got better. When, in the 1840s and 1850s, hundreds of thousands began demanding quinine as a prophylactic, it was clear that it had become the most desirable drug in the world.
In his room in Oxford Street, August Hofmann had a theory as to how quinine might be made in the laboratory. To his credit, he seems not to have been interested primarily in the fortune to be made by such a discovery. He had noted how naphtha, which he called the ‘beautiful’ hydrocarbon, produced in great quantities in the manufacture of coal-gas, may be converted by a relatively
