Witt’s Plate

Today, we are greeted by a riot of colour on entering almost any clothes shop. In the UK, we often remember and celebrate William Henry Perkin for introducing mauveine, the first aniline dye. But the dye industry is a good example of how an industry that began in the UK, lost its way, and came to be dominated by another country entirely: Germany. And among the key players was a man who helped solve the problems of how to isolate a precipitate.