name for Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom. The company's special status as Warrant Holder means that it supplies candles for all Royal state occasions – coronations, weddings, lyings-in-state and funerals. Innovations Technological There was a potential market in England for a mid-priced candle that gave a brighter cleaner light than tallow but was not as expensive as beeswax. What William Wilson and his partner discovered in 1830 was a new raw material and a scientific process that would allow them to manufacture such a candle. The firm they set up, Edward Price and Co, would make candles from coconut! Wilson took out a licence on an 1829 patent for the hydraulic separation of coconut fats, the partners built a candle factory at Vauxhall on the Thames in South West London, a crushing mill just up river at Battersea and invested in 1,000 acres of coconut plantation in Sri Lanka. The initial results were not that impressive, but the infant company had a couple of good breaks: in 1831 candle tax was abolished and by 1835 it had developed better chemical processes to obtain solid fats. In the 1820s a French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul, had published his researches into fatty acids. By mixing a strong alkali with vegetable or animal fats he discovered that the solution separated into liquid and solid components. This technique, known as saponification, was already used by soap makers, but nobody had employed it for candle manufacture. William Wilson's son, George, experimented with this process; by adding a further distillation using a vacuum or high pressure steam he improved Chevreuil's basic chemistry. Price's were now able to refine tallow and vegetable oils to produce a harder, pure white fat known as stearin. Candles made from this burned brightly without smoke or smell. The same chemistry could also be applied to a range of unsavoury raw materials that had previously been unusable – skin fat, bone fat, fish oil and industrial waste greases could all be rendered into hard white candles. Another of George Wilson's innovations allowed Price's to exploit a second overlooked tropical product. Palm oil, extracted from the palm nut was harvested and processed in West Africa. Soap makers were already using the oil but its dark orange-brown colour made it unattractive for candle-making. George devised a process for cleaning palm oil with sulfuric acid and a new cheap source of fat