1868

Laboratory synthesis of alizarin (the red dye of the madder root) in a Berlin technical college, the Gewerbe-Akademie, which “soon led to extensive cooperation between academe and industry . . . that enabled growth in both sectors and brought much prestige to the former. In this way, the original vocational pursuit of dye manufacture spawned the modern science of organic chemistry; and training in organic chemistry in the latter half of the nineteenth century was also training for the synthetic dyestuffs industry.” It was made possible by the benzene ring theory (Kekulé’s six-carbon benzene ring of 1865) (Travis II, 388, 390).