The royals may have enjoyed his quaint English literal translations from German idioms; they were certainly interested in his students’ work on soil and plants – in fact, they were keen on anything which might lead to practical applications.
William Perkin noted how his mentor used to tour the laboratories several times a day and talk to his students as if each piece of their work was of phenomenal importance. Occasionally their work did indeed carry genuine significance; most often it was mundane and doomed. And almost all the time Hofmann seemed to have done it before by himself. ‘I well remember one day,’ Perkin said, ‘when the work was going on very satisfactorily and several new products had been obtained, he came up and commenced examining a product of the nitration of phenol one of the students had obtained by steam distillation. Taking a little of the substance in a watch glass, he treated it with caustic alkali, and at once obtained a beautiful scarlet salt. Looking up at us in his characteristic and enthusiastic way, he at once exclaimed, Gentlemen, new bodies are floating in the air!’*
Another tour was less fruitful. Once, Hofmann was holding a glass bottle containing a little water, and invited a student to pour sulphuric acid into it. The heat cracked the glass, and the acid splashed from the floor into Hofmann’s eyes. ‘Hofmann was sent home in a cab,’ Perkin remembered, ‘and had to be kept in bed in a dark room during several weeks.’ Despite this hardship, he was so anxious about his work that his students were asked to visit him in his murky bedroom to report progress and receive new instructions.
Predictably, Perkin was a formidably diligent student, and found the preliminary coursework rather easy. He sat near a window overlooking Oxford Street’s horsedrawn carriages, and spent some time sharing common interests with a man called Arthur Church seated opposite him. ‘We were both given to painting and were amateur sketchers,’ Church remembered. ‘I was introduced to his home and we began painting a picture together. This must have been soon after the Royal Academy exhibition of 1854, when I had a picture hung.’
Church had created his own domestic laboratory by converting a small aviary at his home, so was keen to see Perkin’s makeshift chemistry room on the top floor at King David Fort, where he worked in the evenings and at weekends. Perkin liked to take his work home with him, particularly when, after the completion of his basic syllabus in 1855, Hofmann had honoured him by making him his youngest assistant. ‘The students working at research seemed to me to be superior beings,’ Perkin observed.
Perkin’s earliest tasks concerned the formation of organic bases from hydrocarbons, but he was more interested in the results of his next assignment which led to one of his earliest published papers. At the beginning of February 1856 he submitted to the Proceedings of the Royal Society a brief report ‘On some new Colouring Matters’ he had found with Arthur Church. ‘This new body presents some remarkable properties,’ they wrote. That substance, which they named nitrosophenyline, was the result of a experiment with hydrogen and a distillation of benzol. It produced a bright crimson colour, it dissolved in alcohol with an orange-red tint, and it changed to a yellowish-brown when diluted with alkali. They concluded that it had ‘a lustre somewhat similar to that of murexide’, the rich purple originally made from guano.
Although August Hofmann was keen to see his students publish (and had in fact communicated the above findings to the journal himself), he believed the colourful discovery was of little value. In one sense he was right, for Perkin and Church could suggest no practical application for their new colour, and so they resumed other work. But it is significant that the pair, both painters, should be alert to what others might consider merely a pretty coincidence.
Hofmann faced other dilemmas. Many of the wealthier patrons of his college were concerned that chemistry was not producing results that would be beneficial to their well-being. And every landowner who had been excited by Justus Liebig’s crusade was soon disappointed that the institution they supported was not, after all, their salvation. Subscriptions dwindled, and the college was forced to merge with the School of Mines; some students in Perkin’s third year gained entry with the sole aim of improving coal extraction.
Even in 1856, there was much debate, and much disquiet, about the true virtues of pure chemistry. Triumphant practical men simply distrusted men of science. The success of the Great Exhibition of 1851, at which the magnificent 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.