of the organic bases of coal tar. Hofmann successfully isolated Kyanol and Leucol, bases previously reported by Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, and showed that Kyanol was almost entirely aniline, previously shown to be a decomposition product of the plant dye indigo. In his first publication (1843) he demonstrated that a variety of substances which had been identified in contemporary chemical literature as obtainable from coal tar naphtha and its derivatives were all a single nitrogenous base, aniline. These included Kyanol, Carl Julius Fritzsche's Anilin, Otto Unverdorben's Krystallin, and Nikolai Zinin's Benzidam. Much of his subsequent work further developed understanding of the natural alkaloids. Hofmann drew an analogy between aniline and ammonia. He wanted to convince chemists that organic bases could be described in terms of derivatives of ammonia. Hofmann successfully converted ammonia into ethylamine and the compounds diethylamine, triethylamine, and tetraethylammonium. He was the first chemist to synthesize the quaternary amines. His method of converting an amide into an amine is known as the Hofmann rearrangement. While primary, secondary, and tertiary amines were stable when distilled at high temperatures under alkaline conditions, the quaternary amine was not. Heating quaternary tetraethylammonium hydroxide yielded tertiary triethylamine vapour. This became the basis of what is now known as the Hofmann elimination, a method for converting quaternary amines into tertiary amines. Hofman successfully applied the method to coniine, the cholinergic poison of hemlock, to derive the first structure of an alkaloid. His method became extremely significant as a tool for examining the molecular structures of alkaloids, and was eventually applied to morphine, coca amine, atropine, and tubocurarine, among others. Coniine eventually became the first of the alkaloids to be artificially synthesised. In 1848, Hofmann's student Charles Blachford Mansfield developed a method of fractional distillation of coal tar and separated out benzene, xylene, and toluene, an essential step towards the development of products from coal tar. In 1856, Hofmann's student William Henry Perkin was attempting to synthesize quinine at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, when he discovered the first aniline dye, mauveine. The discovery led to the creation of a wide range of artificially created colourful textile dyes, revolutionising the fashion world. Hofmann's researches on rosaniline, which he first prepared in 1858, were the beginning of a series of investigations on colouring matter. In 1863, Hofmann showed that aniline blue is a triphenyl derivative of rosaniline and discovered that different alkyl groups could be