- Person
- Adolf von Baeyer
- Lived
- 1835–1917
- Field
- Organic chemistry
- From
- German
The story
For thousands of years the deep blue dye indigo came only from plants, above all from the indigo fields of India. It was prized for its colour and its fastness, and Europe paid a heavy price for it every year. Making indigo in a laboratory from cheap raw materials was one of the great goals of nineteenth-century chemistry, and one of the hardest, because no one knew how its atoms were arranged.
Adolf von Baeyer, born in Berlin in 1835 to a mother from the originally Jewish Itzig family, had been fascinated by indigo since he bought a lump of it on his thirteenth birthday. He began serious work on it in 1865. The research first led him to indole, the ring-shaped core of the indigo molecule, whose correct formula he proposed in 1869. Over the next years, in Berlin, Strasbourg and Munich, he worked out several complete laboratory routes to indigo, and by 1883 he had determined its chemical structure. The Swedish Academy later described three of his syntheses, starting from different nitrogen-containing benzene compounds, and stressed that there had been no lucky accident to shorten the work.
Baeyer’s own routes were too expensive for factories, and industrial chemists needed years more to make synthetic indigo pay. The German firm BASF put the first synthetic indigo on sale in 1897, using a process developed by Karl Heumann on the foundations Baeyer had laid. The effect was rapid. At the 1905 Nobel ceremony the president of the Swedish Academy reported that the price of indigo had already fallen to a third of its former level and that Germany’s exports of synthetic indigo in 1904 were worth more than 25 million marks. He said the problem of producing indigo industrially had been solved because of Baeyer’s basic research.
Synthetic indigo went on to replace the natural dye almost entirely. Today the blue of ordinary denim jeans worn around the world comes from synthetic indigo. Baeyer’s indigo research also shaped organic chemistry itself, and his students carried the same methods into the dye industry, including the work of Carl Graebe and Carl Liebermann on alizarin, the red dye of the madder plant.
Why it matters
Baeyer’s synthesis and structure of indigo laid the groundwork for the cheap synthetic indigo that still dyes the world’s denim.
About Adolf von Baeyer
Berlin-born chemist who synthesized indigo and worked out its structure, helping turn a costly plant dye into a cheap industrial product, and who discovered barbituric acid. Nobel Prize 1905.
Sources
- Award ceremony speech, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1905 NobelPrize.org
- Adolf von Baeyer, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Adolf von Baeyer Jewish Virtual Library (Encyclopaedia Judaica)
- Adolf von Baeyer Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.