Blue Coloring Matter.

Scientific American 2, 13.7.1867

M C. A. Girard, of Paris, has patented improvements in the manufacture of blue coloring matter. He introduces into a distilling apparatus two parts of commercial diphenylamine and three parts of sesquichloride of carbon, and heats the mixture, taking care to maintain the temperature between 170 deg. and 190 deg. Centigrade. The blue color is rapidly developed, and in five or six hours the mass assumes a bronze aspect and becomes brittle on cooling. The melt with the bronze aspect is powdered and treated until complete exhaustion in a dispacement apparatus with benzole or ether at a gentle heat. In this apparatus the warm solvent filters through the powdered melt and is afterward distilled, the vapor is condensed and returned on to the melt, and so on continually. The untransformed sesquichloride of carbon and commercial diphenylamine are dissolved as well as a small quantity of bluish violet; the greater part and the best part of the blue remains undissolved. The blue is then collected and dried, and may, after being dissolved in alcohol or methylated spirit, be at onece employed in dyeing or printing; but, if it be desired to purify it further it may be dissolved in boiling alcohol, filtered and precipitated from the filtered solution by hydrochloric acid. The inventor has observed that pure ditolylamine yields under the same conditions a brown coloring matter; pure diphenylamine yields a blackish violet blue; and penyltolylamine a bluish violet or violet blue; but a mixture of diphenylamine and ditolylamine and of diphenylamine and phenyltolyamine in any proportions yields a blue. He, however, remarks that some proportions are better than others, and that two parts of diphenylamine and one part of ditelylamine are good proportions.