Toms River (4 page)

Fuchsine production required large quantities of arsenic acid, and much of it came out as waste at the end because the dye manufacturing process was so inefficient. As one aniline chemist later wrote: “In the action of arsenic acid … on aniline, only forty percent of soluble, useful coloring matter is formed from the aniline consumed; the rest of the aniline goes over into resinous masses, insoluble in water or in diluted acids. Their nature has not yet been exactly determined in science,
their quantity, however, amounts to many times as much as the quantity of magenta formed.”
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In other words, this astonishingly profitable new industry generated far more toxic waste than useful product, and no one had any idea what was actually in that waste or how to get rid of it. This was still true a century later in Toms River, where Ciba and Geigy were still using the same crude disposal method Müller-Pack had selected back in 1860: dumping untreated, unidentified waste into open pits and unlined lagoons on the factory property.

Müller-Pack was selling fuchsine as fast as he could make it, so in 1862 the Geigy family built a second factory for aniline production and rented this one to him also. The new factory was larger and required even more arsenic acid: 200 kilograms per day, or 441 pounds. That was too much for a lagoon to handle alone (even one that was unlined and leaked like a sieve), so this time Müller-Pack adopted an additional disposal method that would become all too familiar a hundred years later in New Jersey: He discharged his arsenic-laced wastewater into the nearest waterway—in this case, a canal beside the plant that led to the Rhine. On the outskirts of London, Perkin was doing the same thing in the canal next to
his
factory, though on a smaller scale and with less arsenic. Even so, the pollution was apparent enough that his neighbors could tell what color Perkin was making that day by looking at the waters of the canal.
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The Swiss factories were not isolated in the countryside; they were in the middle of a busy city with a long tradition of close attention to public health. In May of 1863, a chemist who worked for the city of Basel, Friedrich Goppelsröder, inspected the two Müller-Pack factories, as well as Alexander Clavel’s, and concluded that working conditions were dangerous and the disposal practices unsanitary. (Goppelsröder did not tell the companies in advance that he was coming—a sharp contrast to what would happen more than a century later in Toms River.) Nine months after Goppelsröder’s inspections, the city council ordered Müller-Pack to stop dumping into the canal and banned Clavel from making any aniline dyes at all. Clavel ignored the order for a while and then built a new factory (still used by Ciba almost 150 years later) that was outside the city limits and, most importantly, next to the Rhine. As an official company history put it,
“The immediate proximity of the river as a direct outlet for effluents and also for the disposal of rubbish had become a vital necessity of colour manufacture.”
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But when Müller-Pack, stuck inside the city limits, proposed discharging his factory’s waste into a tributary of the Rhine, the city rejected his idea because the tributary was too dry. Desperate to resume full production, he then suggested putting all of his waste in barrels and emptying them directly into the river. This scheme, too, was rejected.

By then, Müller-Pack had even bigger problems: His waste was making some of his factory’s neighbors seriously ill. The citizens of Basel got their water from shallow wells, and some of those wells were very close to a factory where Müller-Pack had been dumping waste into an unlined lagoon for two years. In 1863, a railway worker became sick after drinking contaminated water from a nearby well. The following year, a gardener and maid who worked in a home next to the plant fell ill after drinking tea made from water pumped from a tainted well. The owner of the home was a wealthy man, and he summoned Goppelsröder to investigate. The chemist analyzed the well water and reported to city health officials that arsenic levels were “so high that the water must be designated as poisoned, which thus clearly explains the attacks of vomiting, etc.”
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He also noticed that the water was yellowish and had an “indefinable, peculiar, and somewhat repulsive odor”—one that was indisputably awful but difficult to describe (similarly vague terms would be used a century later in Toms River). Goppelsröder then tested the factory’s lagoon and soil and even the sediment at the bottom of a nearby canal, finding contamination everywhere he looked. Based on his report, the city in 1864 ordered the older Müller-Pack plant closed. The city also sued Müller-Pack on behalf of the poison victims (by then there were seven). In March of 1865, after eight months in court, he was found guilty of gross negligence. Müller-Pack was ordered to pay a large fine and compensate the victims as well as nearby landowners for the loss of their property values. He even had to deliver clean drinking water to the neighborhood. The humiliation and expense were too much to bear, so a few months after the guilty verdict, he moved to Paris.

Aniline dyes were still a booming business, however, and the
Geigys, as the landowners, were not about to let Müller-Pack’s factories sit idle. They took over dye production, and soon Johann Rudolf Geigy-Merian convinced the city to let him deal with the waste by building a pipeline, six thousand feet long, to the Rhine. When the pipeline proved inadequate, Geigy workers began to make clandestine nighttime visits to Basel’s Middle Bridge to dump barrels of waste into the fast-moving current in the center of the river.
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Since the Rhine flowed north and Basel was a border city, Geigy’s waste, and Clavel’s, too, became Germany’s problem, not Switzerland’s. From that point on, chemical manufacturers all over the world would follow the same strategy for getting rid of their waste. They would dump on their own property first, since that was always the cheapest alternative, and then if the authorities foreclosed that option, they would instead discharge their liquid waste into the largest and fastest-flowing body of water available. It was no coincidence that the great chemical companies of Switzerland and Germany built many of their factories beside one of the widest and swiftest rivers in Europe and that Perkin made sure that his much smaller factory was next to a canal that led to the Thames.
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Even the mighty Rhine, however, could not sufficiently dilute all the hydrocarbon waste that the dye companies were pouring into it. In 1882, a chemistry professor at the University of Basel placed fish in cages at various points in the Rhine to prove that they were being harmed by dye waste—perhaps the first example of a controlled experiment involving wildlife and industrial pollution.
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By the 1890s, Geigy, Bayer, Ciba, BASF, and others were dumping benzene, toluene, naphthalene, nitrobenzene, and other toxic distillates of coal tar into the river at volumes that would have made Müller-Pack blush. Meanwhile, in the countryside just outside of Basel, the neighbors of Ciba’s huge dye works continued to complain bitterly about the “disagreeable steam or vapours escaping into the atmosphere” that had destroyed the gardens of their country homes. No one was in a position to make the companies stop. The chemical industry was a crucial component of rising German power and Swiss prosperity. When hundreds of Basel residents downwind from Ciba’s smokestacks tried to
block a planned factory expansion in 1900, their protest was rejected on the grounds that “pure Alpine air could not be expected in an industrial area.”
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The rapidly expanding factories, meanwhile, were becoming extremely dangerous places to work. They were booming in every sense of the word, since explosions were a constant threat. So many powerful acids and volatile solvents were used in the dye manufacturing process that Ciba engineers developed an ingenious potential solution: the first wearable respirator, a breathing apparatus designed to protect laborers as they mixed vaporous chemicals by hand. The device was so hot, heavy, and bulky, however, that workers shunned it. Instead, most laborers simply held cloths over their faces—an action that provided almost no protection. Supervisors generally did not insist that the respirators be used because their employees worked much faster without them. Washup rules also went unenforced; not only did Basel’s creeks turn bright blue and red with dumped dye waste, the city’s aniline workers added to the polychromatic spectacle by walking the streets “with their hands and sometimes faces and necks colored in all hues of the spectrum.”
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Accidental poisonings were frequent, with the most common symptoms being convulsions, bloody urine, and skin discoloration. As a result, extremely high rates of worker attrition were considered normal in the dye industry, with one American commentator noting in 1925 that superintendents in aniline factories “considered that their duty had been properly performed if they were able to get out the required production without more than ten percent of their men continuously on leave and if such men as were left were able to at least stand up.”
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Even more ominously, physicians were noticing a new kind of illness they called “aniline tumors.” The man who coined the term was a Frankfurt surgeon named Ludwig Wilhelm Carl Rehn. In 1895, he diagnosed bladder cancer in three of the forty-five dye workers he examined who were engaged in the production of fuchsine magenta. By 1906, he had documented thirty-eight similarly stricken workers in Frankfurt, and other doctors in Switzerland and Germany were making similar observations. Within four years, a leading Swiss medical professor was
calling bladder cancer in aniline factories “the most noticeable occupational disease that made a most terrible impression on all who came in contact with it because of its awfulness and malignancy.”
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The growing evidence of harm did nothing to slow the industry’s growth. Like its competitors, Ciba expanded all over Europe after the turn of the century, building factories in Poland, Russia, France, and England. By 1913, Ciba had almost three thousand employees, most of them making products for export or working overseas. The German companies grew even faster. In fact, dyes and pharmaceuticals were the two biggest sources of export revenue for Switzerland and Germany until World War I, when many of the German factories switched over to making explosives and poison gas for the Kaiser’s armies. The neutral Swiss eventually picked up the slack and thrived. In 1917, Ciba’s revenues topped fifty million Swiss francs (equivalent to about US $180 million today)—and 30 percent of it was profit.
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In the aftermath of the lost war, and the forced abrogation of many of their prized patents, Germany’s chemical companies embarked on a new survival strategy. The formerly fierce competitors began to work very closely with each other to try to stay ahead of newly strengthened foreign competitors, especially in the United States. Their efforts would climax in the 1925 merger of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, and others into the conglomerate
Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie
(Community of Interest of the Dye Industry), or I.G. Farben, which would gain infamy during World War II as the patent holder of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based poison gas used at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. In the years after the First World War, however, the German companies were still admired for their technical prowess.

The Germans’ new cartel strategy had a predictable impact across the border in Basel, the manufacturing hub of
der Räuber-Staat
, with its long tradition of appropriating foreign ideas. Swiss profits were falling as German companies reentered world markets, so Ciba, Geigy, and Sandoz, the three largest Swiss dye manufacturers, decided to form a “community of interest” of their own. It was a partnership, not a merger (the mergers would not come until 1971 and 1996), and it was aimed in part at breaking into the biggest market in the world.
American tariffs were high. The only way around them was to buy or build a plant in the United States to make products for the American market. In 1920, the three Swiss companies did just that, buying two old factories in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The dye makers of Basel were nothing if not consistent. If the Ohio Valley was America’s Ruhr, its industrial heartland, then the Ohio River was its Rhine and Cincinnati its Basel. The Ohio was wide and deep with a brisk current, and Cincinnati was full of factories, which meant that the newly named Cincinnati Chemical Works would not stand out. Best of all, the factories the Swiss bought were already hooked up to the city’s sewer system, which “treated” waste only in the loosest sense. As in Basel, the city pipes simply channeled it into the creeks and canals that emptied into the concealing waters of the Ohio. At the time, no one seemed bothered that the river was also the principal source of drinking water for more than seven hundred thousand people who lived in Cincinnati and in fourteen other cities farther downstream. After more than a half-century of dumping hazardous chemicals into the Rhine, the Swiss companies were not interested in changing the way they did business now that they had arrived in America.

Subsequent events unfolded like a movie sequel. By the mid-1920s, the Cincinnati Chemical Works was generating steady profits for the Swiss, who responded by expanding into resins and specialty chemicals as well as dyes. Both factories—one in the city’s Norwood neighborhood and the other nearby in St. Bernard—grew quickly, and so did their smokestack emissions and wastewater discharges. The growth reached a fever pitch during World War II when the Cincinnati Chemical Works made dyes for military uniforms and smoke grenades and also became the country’s biggest producer of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), the “miracle chemical” whose potent insecticidal properties had been discovered in 1939 by a Geigy chemist named Paul Hermann Müller. Amid the prosperity, few people paid attention to the appearance of what seemed to be an unusual number of bladder cancer cases among the St. Bernard plant’s dye workers, who were handling the same chemicals that had triggered bladder tumors back in Europe.