12
1863
Empress Eugenie wore it to the Paris Opera, it became the fashion rage.
The most impressive theoretical chemical research was still going on in
English laboratories.  So German industrial firms offered huge amounts of
money to German chemists working in Britain.  Then they put the
British-trained recruits to work making useful new substances in the
fatherland.  Among those the Germans lured back was the professor whose
suggestion had stimulated young Perkin to attempt the synthesis of quinine
to begin with.
Perkin himself had made his fortune.  At 36, he retired to pursue a life
in "pure science."  The British dye industry shriveled in his absence.  But the
German dye business became the first step in a technology that would
revolutionize the future.  It was the foundation of the chemical industry.13
That industry would have far-reaching implications for every aspect of
human life.  One example: using chemical fertilizers, German farmers were
soon able to produce more food per acre than any of the other Great Powers.
England had invented, then discarded, one of the keys to the coming age.
And the Germans had enthusiastically scooped up what the British had
tossed aside.
Chemical products were not the only futuristic goods that would soon
make English steam engines look old fashioned.  Laboring in British
laboratories were some of the greatest physicists of the age--Michael Faraday
and James Clerk Maxwell.14  These men and a few others were coming up
with astonishing discoveries about the properties of a peculiar force that had
puzzled men of science for two centuries.15  Its name: electricity.  But British
industrialists did not buzz around Faraday and Maxwell's labs, anxious to
discover what practical uses they could find for the pair's groundbreaking
discoveries.
The folks who did plunge into the electricity business with every scrap
of ingenuity they could muster were Americans and Germans.16    The  first
electric generating plant in Britain to sell power to the ordinary householder
was built by  an unschooled Ohio go-getter named Thomas Alva Edison.
  , one German researcher came up with a rich shade of green.  When the
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