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Alexander Clavel (17 December 1805 – 22 February 1873), also recorded as Alexander Clavel-Oswald and Alexander Clavel-Linder in 19th-century Basel sources, was a French-born Swiss textile industrialist and silk dyer who, in 1859, began producing the synthetic dye fuchsine in Basel. In 1873 he sold his works to Bindschedler & Busch, the predecessor of the Gesellschaft für Chemische Industrie in Basel Society ( Ciba). His early adoption of synthetic dyes and his move to the Basel-Klybeck district were pivotal in Basel's emergence as a European center of the dye and chemical industries.
In 1859, Clavel began manufacturing fuchsine (also marketed as magenta or aniline red) for the silk ribbon trade in Basel, one of the earliest such ventures in Switzerland. Fuchsine belongs to the triarylmethane class; in 19th-century trade literature it was often called aniline red, but that term was used loosely for related red aniline dyes and is not chemically precise. Modern historical reviews distinguish fuchsine/magenta from looser uses of aniline red.
Complaints about fumes from arsenic-based processes led Basel authorities to restrict aniline-red production; in 1864 Clavel moved the works to the Klybeckstrasse on the Rhine, creating a "Laboratorium für Fabrikation von Anilin- und anderen Farben" Laboratory. The move marked a shift of colour chemistry to Basel's outskirts and foreshadowed the city's industrial expansion.
In 1873, weeks before his death, his dye plant was sold to the chemist Robert Bindschedler and the businessman Albert Busch ( Bindschedler & Busch), whose partnership was reorganized in 1884 as the Gesellschaft für Chemische Industrie in Basel (Ciba).
Clavel's enterprise established the lineage that grew into Ciba-Geigy and later Novartis. Basel's chemical-industrial surge was driven by such early dye makers and the relocation to Klybeck.
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