    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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