Out of fashion

Chemistry gains momentum

Spirit of innovation

Even today, old wooden salt drilling towers can be found in Schweizerhalle, in Riburg and in the spa gardens of Rheinfelden. They bear witness to the industrial past.

Science

Silk, salt and a short walk

Basel’s rise to a cosmopolitan city and a world-leading industrial center cannot be explained as a simple coincidence or sheer luck. The city’s ascent to economic pre-eminence, which would later culminate in the development of a world-class pharma hub, was also precipitated by the discovery of salt deposits in the early 19th century.

Text by Goran Mijuk, photos by Adriano A. Biondo and from the Novartis Company Archive

Ribbon factory of Emanuel Hoffmann, between 1770 and 1780, the oldest pattern book.

Table of contents

Out of fashion

Chemistry gains momentum

Spirit of innovation

“Oh, this is a wonderful life – a ribbon weaver’s life. The moment you get out of your diapers, you are already hit by misfortune …”

The Ribbon Weaver’s Song by Ruedi Raecher, from which the above lines are taken, is hardly known today. In fact, only very few people today know what a “ribbon weaver” is, or better, was.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, this wasn’t the case. Long before the chemical and pharmaceutical industries came to dominate Basel, when Klybeck was still a green paradise interspersed with lush meadows and vineyards, the ribbon weavers were the symbol of the city’s economic prowess. Back then, Basel was the epicenter of a flourishing silk ribbon industry, where thousands of ribbon or silk weavers, as they were also called, manufactured a wide array of decorative trimmings such as buttons, braids, cords and tassels.

Sarasin and Co.

The rise of silk ribbon manufacturing in Basel began in the late 16th century when religious refugees from Holland, Italy and France flocked to Basel in large numbers in the hope of finding shelter and a new life. Just as French Protestants had helped Geneva thrive as a center of commerce and watch making, it was the persecuted Huguenots who infused Basel with a new cultural and economic vibrancy, which proved to be instrumental in the city’s subsequent economic growth.

Peter Serwauter, a Calvinist refugee from Antwerp, was among the first ribbon weavers to settle in Basel in 1571. However, it was thanks to the French merchants Sarasin, Socin, Battier and Passavant that the city’s weaving industry took off in the late 18th century. Not only did these merchants help transform Basel into a thriving pre-industrial manufacturing center, but they also facilitated the industrialization of the entire region as they introduced the so-called cottage system, in which rural workers manufactured goods in their own homes, which were then bought by urban merchants and resold for a considerable profit.

With the advent of the industrial revolution, hand-operated looms were replaced by steam and electric-powered ones, allowing production on a much larger scale. By that time, Basel had morphed into a major production hub, whose influence extended far beyond the borders of the Swiss Confederation. As noted by Swiss historian Paul Roth, the success story of Basel was already attracting the attention of the European elite in the late 18th century. For instance, during his visit to Basel in the summer of 1777, Austrian Emperor Joseph II inquired about the city’s exceedingly lucrative weaving industry and expressed his desire to take a closer look. At the so-called White House, where the company of Hans Franz Sarasin was producing silk ribbons at the time, the Emperor came to experience the intricacies of silk-weaving firsthand.

Around 1770, Basel had 16,000 inhabitants and around 20 ribbon factories. Over 1200 looms were in operation by that time. The economy was booming, and by the turn of the century the number of ribbon looms had doubled. It reached its peak around the middle of the 18th century when the industry generated an annual turnover of more than 80 million Swiss francs. Silk ribbon weaving remained the predominant employer in Basel until the beginning of the First World War, employing more than 8000 people in the city alone and another 12,000 in the surrounding countryside in 1905.

Belt factory Trüdinger & Co., 1862.

Out of fashion

A few years later, however, the industry took an irreversible downturn, as the decorative silk ribbons went out of fashion, and production gradually shifted to low-wage countries.

In 1984, Swiss television interviewed one of the last ribbon weavers, Helena Dupraz, from the small town of Gelterkinden. She had pursued this profession for over 40 years, initially as a factory worker, then as a home weaver. Her life as a weaver was never easy, just as Ruedi Raecher describes in his weaver’s song. “Ten hours a day it is. At six o’clock I start. Around eight o’clock I stop,” she explained to the interviewing journalist. “The earnings are very modest. But I always enjoyed the work,” Dupraz noted.

“If I’d cleaned for three hours, I would have earned more … But the money wasn’t that important to me,” she explained. A few years after the interview was aired, the region’s last silk ribbon business closed its doors, which marked the end of a long tradition that had shaped Basel’s history for over 200 years.

Although ribbon weavers have long since disappeared from the city’s landscape, and many of the former textile barons long moved on to seek their fortunes in other sectors, the city still bears traces of this past. As a matter of fact, it was the weaving industry that kick-started the city’s economic miracle, which saw a small town blossom into a chemicals hub.

Salt of life

For many decades, ribbon weavers used the colorants supplied by textile dyers. As a result, dyeing grew into a profitable business, as demand for color dyes increased over time. A major breakthrough for the city’s dyestuffs industry came in 1836 when the German entrepreneur Carl Christian Friedrich Glenck discovered salt deposits near Muttenz, a town outside Basel. The dyeing factories required large amounts of salt, which until then was imported from abroad. Glenck’s discovery allowed dyers to move away from expensive imports and stimulated the development of dye chemicals – a sector that overtook the textile industry and became the backbone of the city’s economic success in the 20th century.

For centuries, Switzerland imported its salt from its neighbors, mainly from France, Germany and Austria. The salt deposits at Bex in the canton of Vaud had been mined since the late 17th century, though their capacity wasn’t sufficient to meet the entire domestic demand. The dyers, who used salt to drive the dye onto the fiber, were thus forced to move abroad.

Glenck, who had previously made a name for himself in Germany as a mining expert, and to whom Goethe had dedicated a poem for his achievements, was nonetheless convinced that Switzerland had an abundance of salt and began to drill the first exploration wells in 1820.

Although his initial efforts proved futile, Glenck resumed his painstaking pursuit, which was to last 16 years. Glenck’s story was also adapted into an audio drama, which was aired on Swiss radio in 1950. Here’s an excerpt:

“The distinguished salt expert Mr. Carl Friedrich Christian Glenck arrived in Eglisau today. He intends to dig for salt. We wish him the best of luck in his praiseworthy undertaking. The drilling lasted a full year. However, it was not successful. Although this attempt had cost 120,000 francs, Glenck starts drilling anew. Again unsuccessful. Third drilling attempt, 200 meters deep, also unsuccessful. Fourth drilling attempt, this time in Biel, unsuccessful.”

Glenck, however, refused to give up, even though his lengthy quest pushed him to the verge of financial ruin. “Fifth drilling attempt, unsuccessful. Sixth drilling attempt, in the canton of Schaffhausen, unsuccessful. Seventh drilling attempt, unsuccessful. Each drilling attempt costs 120,000 francs. Eighth drilling attempt, unsuccessful. Ninth drilling attempt, unsuccessful. Tenth drilling attempt, unsuccessful. Eleventh drilling attempt, unsuccessful. Twelfth drilling attempt, 1824 in Sion, unsuccessful. Thirteenth drilling attempt, in Porrentruy, unsuccessful. Fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth drilling attempt – unsuccessful. Glenck had already spent over 2 million francs! Seventeenth drilling attempt, 1834 at the Oberdorf mill in the canton of Basel-Landschaft, unsuccessful. Eighteenth drilling attempt – success! A salt deposit on Swiss soil!”

The famous Ferrari red from Ciba-Geigy is a synthetic, organic color pigment. It is characterized by excellent lightfastness and weather resistance.

Chemistry gains momentum

The city of Basel was initially unable to benefit from the discovery. After the administrative separation of the city of Basel from the rural canton in 1833, which had been preceded by several years of political crisis, the city refused to buy salt from its new neighbor, instead acquiring it from Germany at a much higher price. The animosity between the two cantons was so fierce that Basel financed the construction of new salt works in Aargau to diversify its supplier portfolio and gain a competitive edge over its much-hated neighbor. But with the advent of artificial dyes and the rapid growth of the dye industry, the city was forced to turn to Basel-Landschaft, which was blessed with rich deposits.

In 1870, only a few years after the first chemical dye factories had started their operations in Basel’s Klybeck district, the dye industry consumed 317,878 kilograms of salt. This was less than the total salt consumption of Swiss households in the same year. Five years later, however, the industry’s demand for the resource had grown fourfold. In 1880, almost 3 million kilograms of salt were used for dyeing textiles.

The upward trajectory continued into the 20th century. Salt was an indispensable material for the chemical industry, first used in the production of artificial dyes and later in many chemical processes.

Without the “white gold” from the salt works in Schweizerhalle and Riburg, which together produce more than 600,000 tons of salt per year, Basel’s chemical industry, which at its peak in the mid-1970s employed more than 40,000 people, wouldn’t have grown as large as it had. It is also doubtful whether Ciba, Geigy, Sandoz and Lonza would have ever become such dominant global players. As such, Basel was able to unlock its full potential and, following the discovery of aniline dyes by William Harvey Perkin in 1856, build a robust dyestuffs industry by exploiting the low-cost salt from the region.

By the 20th century, Klybeck had morphed into a large chemical production site, where not only color pigments such as diketopyrrolopyrrole – better known as Ferrari red – or indigo blue were produced. Synthetic resins such as Araldite and a variety of agrochemical products were also synthesized here in the very heart of Basel. The bestknown of these agricultural products was undoubtedly the insecticide DDT, which earned its inventor, Paul Hermann Mueller, the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1948. Mueller conducted his research at J.R. Geigy in Rosenthal – a stone’s throw from the Klybeck site.

Basel becomes a big city

With the boom of the chemical industry, Basel became a big city. Around 1880, about 60,000 people lived on the banks of the Rhine, whereas by the late 1960s, the city’s inhabitants numbered almost 230,000.

Lofty chimneys and fuming smokestacks dominated the city’s skyline at that time, which spewed toxins and pollutants into the air. The residents repeatedly complained about the pungent odor emanating from the factories. But they were also proud of the chemical industry. “If it doesn’t stink in Basel, something stinks,” was then a common saying among the people, who knew exactly to whom the city owed its rise.

But just like the silk ribbon industry, whose traces are almost invisible today, the boom of the chemical sector also didn’t last forever. New companies penetrated the market, which brought about intense competition. Furthermore, many chemical processes that used to require intense human labor were either automated or outsourced to low-wage countries. Years of decline and mass layoffs followed – to the distress of the city’s inhabitants.

Alex Krauer, Chairman and Delegate of the Board of Directors of Ciba-Geigy. After the merger with Sandoz, he was Chairman of the Board of Novartis from 1996 to 1999.

Spirit of innovation

Nevertheless, the city managed to emerge from this crisis in a much better shape. Basel, which was the first city north of the Alps to found a university and which, thanks to a booming printing press, established itself as a refuge for intellectuals and artists already in the Middle Ages, has always been imbued with a distinctive “pioneer spirit,” which has helped the city to weather numerous storms and seize new opportunities.

Perhaps it is the Rhine, with its majestic power, that taught the people of Basel early on to keep their eyes on the future and not cling to the status quo.

World-renowned intellectuals, such as Leonhard Euler, the Bernoulli Brothers, Carl Gustav Jung and Jacob Burckhardt – who all, at some point, lived in Basel – epitomize the progressive nature of the city, where innovation has always been important. The first railroad line and train station in Switzerland were built here. Basel was also the city in which the country’s first steam engine was put into operation. With the construction of the Rhine port in St. Johann in 1905, the city was further integrated into the global economy.

It was the unwavering belief in progress which helped the city recover from the demise of the chemical industry and move to a new and prosperous future.

From chemicals to pharmaceuticals

The 1996 merger of Ciba-Geigy (based in Klybeck) and Sandoz (which had its headquarters on the opposite side of the Rhine in St. Johann) was a landmark event that catapulted Basel into a new era, while accelerating the shift away from chemistry toward life sciences.

Even before the founding of Novartis, Klybeck had seen many breakthroughs in medical research, including the groundbreaking hormone therapies or the anti-inflammatory Voltaren in the 1970s. However, it was not until the foundation of Novartis that the site was revamped into an innovation center dedicated entirely to pharmaceutical research.

Nevertheless, the planned restructuring sparked criticism among staff working at the Klybeck site, who already felt disadvantaged by the relocation of the new company’s headquarters to St. Johann. One employee told Swiss radio: “When a colleague brought me the letter informing us about the future of Klybeck, I thought it was an April Fool’s joke. But right now, I feel as if the sky is falling in.” There was some swearing too: “A lot of people feel screwed. There is uncertainty, and you don’t know what’s coming for us.” Another employee said: “I thought I was going crazy. This was totally unexpected. The first thing I thought was, this is going to cost jobs again.”

Management, however, saw the situation differently. Ciba-Geigy Chairman Alex Krauer was convinced that the merger was the right move, as expressed in his speech at the press conference on March 7, 1996: “What constitutes a short walk across the Rhine, from one site to another, is a huge step for the two companies. Bringing two strong and successful companies together to form an even stronger, more promising one is a fascinating vision.”

Krauer’s vision has become reality, as Novartis has grown into one of the most respected pharmaceutical companies in the world. In addition, both Basel and Switzerland benefited from the momentum generated by the merger: While around 25,000 people were employed in the Swiss pharmaceutical sector in 1997, the figure had risen to 45,000 by 2017, most of the jobs being in Basel. Furthermore, another 138,000 people worked in supplier industries.

The future

Today, we can only speculate as to whether Basel’s success will endure and what the city will look like in 100 years. Perhaps by then, the pharmaceutical industry will have been long gone and a new branch of industry – one that looks irrelevant from today’s perspective – will be making its way. Who knows, perhaps its story will also be set in Klybeck.

Nevertheless, the city of Basel, a place brimming with creativity and innovation, is never short of groundbreaking ideas.

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Silk, salt and a short walk

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