Greenfield El Dorado

Basel paints enjoy success

Alexander Clavel, born 1805 in Lyon, died 1873 in Basel.

Ecstasy of colors

When Alexander Clavel – a Basel resident by adoption – relocated from Kleinbasel to Klybeck quarter, the stage was set for the rise of the city’s chemicals industry. Yet, the formula that made his start-up successful was not his own, rather a copy-cat version of a French invention – something which wasn’t unusual at that time.

Text by Michael Mildner, photos from the Novartis Company Archive, illustration by Capucine Matti

The color of success: Ciba PF7 Fuchsin Sample Book II, L. Peyer, 1863.

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Greenfield El Dorado

Basel paints enjoy success

It was an icy, cloudy day in the winter of 1859. The wind whistled across the closely spaced roofs of “lesser Basel,” as the Kleinbasel side of the Rhine was then called. In the middle of this densely populated area, on the lower Rebgasse, Alexander Clavel had taken over a dye factory and the associated laboratory a few years earlier. In the farthest corner of the factory, the French chemist and Basel resident was now working on his laboratory instruments and dyeing vats.

Clavel was in a hurry; shortly before, he had received a brand-new recipe for the artificial red dye fuchsin, a color looking much like pink, from his French relatives in Lyon, the Renard brothers. Clavel knew that he held the key to fame and fortune. He was determined to be the first to produce the new dye in Switzerland – and he succeeded.

Without realizing it, Clavel laid an important foundation in his small Basel factory for Switzerland’s soon-to-be-strong chemical industry, as Novartis company archivist Walter Dettwiler knows. For years, Dettwiler has been intensively studying the development of Basel’s industry and its importance in the international arena. “The middle of the 19th century was a time of transition. Until then, only natural dyes such as indigo or purple had been known. The raw materials for these came from far away and production was costly. When the first artificial dye was discovered in England in 1856, a kind of gold-rush atmosphere broke out, and everyone wanted to earn money from these new dyes.”

The artificially produced dyes were also called aniline dyes because the nitrogen compound aniline was one of the main components in dye synthesis. The aniline, in turn, was obtained from coal tar. This substance was available in abundance in Basel.

At that time, gas obtained from coal was used as a means of street lighting in Basel. Chemists used the cheap tar residues from the gas works to produce their new dyes. These were much more resistant to washing and sunlight than the natural dyes. In addition, it was now possible to produce completely different, brightly shining or dark and strong shades of color.

None of this had been possible before. Walter Dettwiler describes the effect that the new dyes had in Basel as follows: “We know from old records that Clavel seized his opportunity and was able to sell the new red fuchsin dye with great success. Demand was so high that he soon replaced all natural dyes with synthetic dyes.” Legally, too, everything was in order. Although fuchsin dye was patented in France, Clavel was able to produce the dye in Switzerland. This was because there was no patent law here in the mid-19th century that would have protected foreign inventions.

Moving away from Kleinbasel

Clavel’s economic success, however, also brought him trouble. Residents living near the factory complained loudly about the toxic arsenic fumes that were produced during manufacture.

Their protest to the Basel City Council about the “pestilential stench” eventually led to a ban on production. Alexander Clavel reacted very quickly to this prohibition, as Walter Dettwiler explains: “Of course, Clavel did not want to lose the lucrative dye business. He therefore moved his business to the Klybeck district outside the city limits in 1864. This is where his entirely new and larger dye business was established.”

Clavel’s success also attracted other entrepreneurs. Just a few months later, Armand Gerber, an entrepreneur from Alsace, and Wilhelm Uhlmann from Basel built another aniline dye company on Klybeckstrasse next to Clavel’s dye factory.

Label by Bindschedler & Busch (later CIBA) for India. 1873–1884. Printers unknown. Probably the Maharajah Ranbir Singh (1830–1885). The medals again represent prizes won at major exhibitions.

Greenfield El Dorado

Here in Klybeck, there were no residents far and wide who could complain about the emissions, as had been the case in the city. On the contrary, there was plenty of space on the greenfield site just outside Basel. In addition, the Rhine was a convenient traffic route that could also be used as a discreet sewer. The railroad connections that linked Basel with France and Germany were also an advantage. The new dye factories were located in the midst of a flourishing silk ribbon and textile industry.

In Alsace, the first textile printing factory was founded as early as 1746. From 1835 onwards, spinning and weaving mills were opened as branches of the Basel factories in the neighboring valley of Wiesental, in Germany. In the Basel region itself, textile entrepreneurs built more and more factories for silk ribbons, which were fashionable at the time.

Due to the success of the textile industry in the border triangle where Switzerland, Germany and France converge, the demand for dyes was constantly increasing. Roger Ehret, a journalist and city guide from Basel, puts Clavel’s achievement in a historical context: “Alexander Clavel was the first, but not the only one, to produce synthetic dyes in Basel. In 1862, three years after the discovery of fuchsin in France, three manufacturing plants for tar dyes already existed in Basel: the Clavel silk dye works in Kleinbasel, the J. J. Müller-Pack extract factory in Rosental, and Jean Dollfuss’ plant next to the gas factory in St. Johann. With the construction of Gerber & Uhlmann, a fourth dye factory was added.”

Spies in Basel

At the heart of a flourishing textile industry, with good transport links and access to cheap coal tar as a raw material for artificial dyes, Basel had excellent conditions for becoming a successful industrial city.

But there was another factor that contributed decisively to the rise of the chemical industry in Basel, as Roger Ehret recounts: “Unlike Germany and France, Switzerland had no patent law until 1887, and there was no patent protection for chemical products until 1907. So foreign chemists kept bringing new knowledge and processes to Basel, where they were developed very efficiently.”

During this turbulent period, chemical dye formulations were guarded like state secrets – and accordingly often spied upon. The “spies” could earn a fortune by passing on the formulations. Roger Ehret explains the reasons for this: “The Alsatian chemist Jules Albert Schlumberger was one such spy. He had been employed by various companies himself to learn the manufacturing processes and then sold them on to his new employers. This was only possible because of the lack of patent protection.”

As a guest of Jean Gerber-Keller, who had discovered azalein in France in 1859, Schlumberger learned about the manufacturing process for this dye and also about the Lyon fuchsin process from the silk dyer Clavel.

When Gerber-Keller was then hired as chief chemist at the Müller-Pack dye factory, he brought his wide-ranging knowledge to the company, which subsequently expanded its business rapidly but came to an abrupt end, as Roger Ehret explains. “The Müller-Pack success story ended after just two years, however, because seven people suddenly fell ill with arsenic poisoning in the neighborhood of his dye factory. The government initiated criminal proceedings against Müller-Pack, and the entrepreneur was sentenced to a fine and high pension and damage payments for personal injury resulting from negligence. He also had to build pipelines that discharged all the toxic residues into the Rhine.”

The arsenic trial of 1864 ruined Müller-Pack, while another Basel industrialist, Johann Rudolf Geigy, profited from it: He acquired all the factory equipment at a favorable price and further expanded the dyestuffs business.

Geigy label for India. 1900s. Lithograph: Gebrüder Lips printing company, Basel. View of the Babulnath temple in Mumbai (India) dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva.

Basel paints enjoy success

The steady growth of the Basel chemical industry was also clearly noticeable in Klybeck. Until about 1870, the undeveloped land that was not needed for the chemical factories was mainly used as pasture.

In the last third of the 19th century, this land was given over to residential buildings for the workers in Klybeck. The success of dye production led to an increase not only in the number of factories, but also in the competition between the individual companies.

Any company that wanted to be successful had to continually expand and rationalize its production facilities and laboratories. The larger the installations, the more economically the company could be run.

Alexander Clavel could no longer keep up financially with this accelerated growth. In 1873, he sold his factory, which employed 30 people at the time, to his competitor Robert Bindschedler, who also produced fuchsin in Schweizerhalle.

Company archivist Walter Dettwiler describes the further development as follows: “As Bindschedler & Busch, the company grew for 11 years, increased production and expanded its business. But when the company eventually reached its financial limits, it was decided to convert it into a stock corporation. Thus, in 1884, the Gesellschaft für Chemische Industrie Basel, abbreviated CIBA, was founded.”

Just two years later, the two Swiss businessmen Alfred Kern and Edouard Sandoz founded their dye factory at the old gasworks in Basel’s St. Johann district in 1886. This company gave rise to what later became Sandoz, which merged with CIBA’s successor company Ciba-Geigy in 1996 to form today’s Novartis.

From dyes to medicine

Shortly before the merger to form Novartis, the two predecessor companies, Sandoz and Ciba, had spun off their dye-producing businesses to focus primarily on higher value-added pharmaceutical products.

However, the transition to a new era, away from dye chemistry and toward pharmaceuticals, had already been announced at the end of the 19th century, as Walter Dettwiler reports: “At that time, some Basel dye companies were already producing the first chemical remedies. To do this, they initially used foreign inventions, since these were not yet protected by patents in Switzerland. In 1887, for example, CIBA decided to produce an antipyretic drug made by the German company Farbenwerke Hoechst, and Sandoz launched its first imitation pharmaceutical product in 1895.”

With the introduction of patent protection for chemical products in 1907, the Basel companies stepped up their own research into both dyes and pharmaceutical products. They thus opened another chapter in Basel’s industrial history, one based not on imitation of existing products but on their own successful innovation.

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