11
was a continent every European power longed for a slice of, but white men
who traveled a few miles inland from the African coasts almost invariably
sickened and died.  The key reason...once again, malaria.12  Until the disease
could be stopped, British entrepreneurs would have to camp out in African
port cities, trading with the natives, collecting tales of the dark continent's
unexploited resources, yet utterly helpless to go inland and tap those riches
themselves.
There was hope.  The bark of a Peruvian plant, the cinchona, could be
used to make a derivative called quinine.  And quinine seemed to be the
magic bullet against malarial fever.  But British botanists had almost no luck
in cultivating enough cinchona plants to make even the smallest amount of
quinine, much less enough to serve entire armies.
Meanwhile, the British had learned how to extract a vapor from coal
and use this gas for lighting.  But the extraction process produced a useless
form of trash--coal tar.  Though disposing of the stuff was a messy business,
scientists poked around in the sludge to get a handle on its chemical
properties.  At London's Royal College of Chemistry, a German professor
suggested to an assistant that the young man see if he could somehow create
an artificial quinine from the goo.  The assistant, William Perkin, tried hard,
but missed the mark.  Instead of quinine, he ended up with a liquid whose
color was a tantalizing shade of mauve.  Perkin tried the solution out as a
cloth dye...and, sure enough, it worked.  Realizing he had a hot property on
his hands, the young man dropped his university assistantship, borrowed
every penny his father had, and opened a small factory outside London.  Not
long after, even Queen Victoria was wearing gowns tinted with Perkin's
mauve.
The British may have invented the new synthetic dyes, but in the long
run they were not the ones to profit from them.  Despite Perkin's rapid rise to
millionaire status, most British industrialists turned up their noses at his
discovery.  The Germans, however, did not.  They worked like maniacs to
find out what else they could extract from the grunge produced by coal.  In
  Illness posed another obstacle to Britain's colonial ambitions.  Africa
<<  <  GO  >  >>