Höchst

This guide to Hoechst in Frankfurt starts beside a steam engine on the Main riverbank in September 1863, where three chemists watched a pot of aniline oil and arsenic acid turn a glowing magenta they called fuchsine. You'll hear how their five-person firm, Meister, Lucius and Company, grew within two decades into a plant synthesizing thousands of colors, and how in 1883 one of its chemists adapted a patent for quinine into Kairin, among the first synthetic drugs made anywhere. It traces a district built entirely on a color nobody set out to find.