With few exceptions the main technical inventions of the first industrial phase had not required much advanced scientific knowledge. Indeed . . . they had been within the grasp of practical men with experience and common sense. . . . From the mid-century this ceased increasingly to be so. . . . The artificial dye-stuffs industry, a triumph of mass chemical synthesis, though its first product (the color mauve) is not universally acclaimed aesthetically, came from the laboratory into the factory.

—The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, Eric Hobsbawm