    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

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