As a consequence of letting the dye business get away from her, England found herself in a fix when war broke out.  She did not have dyes for her uniforms and flags, and she did not have drugs for her wounded.  She could not take advantage of the blockade to capture the German trade in Asia and South America, because she could not color her textiles.  A blue cotton dyestuff that sold before the war at sixty cents a pound, brought $34 a pound.  A bright pink rhodamine formerly quoted at a dollar a pound jumped to $48.  When one keg of dye ordinarily worth $15 was put up at forced auction sale in 1915 it was knocked down at $1500.  The Highlanders could not get the colors for their kilts until some German dyes were smuggled into England.  The textile industries of Great Britain, that brought in a billion dollars a year and employed one and a half million workers, were crippled for lack of dyes.  The demand for high explosives from the front could not be met because these also are largely coal-tar products.  Picric acid is both a dye and an explosive.  It is made from carbolic acid and the famous trinitrotoluene is made from toluene, both of which you will find in the list of the ten fundamental “crudes.”

Both Great Britain and the United States realized the danger of allowing Germany to recover her former monopoly, and both have shown a readiness to cast overboard their traditional policies to meet this emergency.  The British Government has discovered that a country without a tariff is a land without walls.  The American Government has discovered that an industry is not benefited by being cut up into small pieces.  Both governments are now doing all they can to build up big concerns and to provide them with protection.  The British Government assisted in the formation of a national company for the manufacture of synthetic dyes by taking one-sixth of the stock and providing $500,000 for a research laboratory.  But this effort is now reported to be “a great failure” because the Government put it in charge of the politicians instead of the chemists.

The United States, like England, had become dependent upon Germany for its dyestuffs.  We imported nine-tenths of what we used and most of those that were produced here were made from imported intermediates.  When the war broke out there were only seven firms and 528 persons employed in the manufacture of dyes in the United States.  One of these, the Schoelkopf Aniline and Chemical Works, of Buffalo, deserves mention, for it had stuck it out ever since 1879, and in 1914 was making 106 dyes.  In June, 1917, this firm, with the encouragement of the Government Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, joined with some of the other American producers to form a trade combination, the National Aniline and Chemical Company.  The Du Pont Company also entered the field on an extensive scale and soon there were 118 concerns engaged in it with great profit.  During the war $200,000,000 was invested in the domestic dyestuff industry.