Sir William Perkin, who died 100 years ago today, invented the aniline dye mauveine. The purple chemical infused London’s textile trade with a new passion and coloured the future of industrial chemistry.
Anna Winterbottom
Sir William Perkin. Image copyright The Royal Society.
Purple Power
The colour purple has long been associated with royalty, and possesses religious significance in Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. But an economical purple dye remained elusive until the 19th Century. ‘Tyrian purple’ – actually crimson – had been extracted from gastropod molluscs since ancient times, but was difficult to obtain and more expensive than gold.
{color:blueviolet} By the 19th century, France had pioneered lichen dyes, achieving a shade similar to that of the mallow flower from which the word ‘mauve’ is derived. In Britain the indigo plant, acquired from India, yielded a popular shade, while crimson colours were derived from the cochineal insect native to South America or from the madder plant.
%{color:blueviolet} These sources, however, involved a dependence on a finite supply of natural materials from overseas, which did not match the expansion in textile production on which the industrialising European economies of the period were based. Finding effective alternatives to natural dyes was therefore of more than aesthetic importance. The solution eventually came from a grimy by-product of the industrial revolution – coal tar – from which the first aniline dye, mauveine, was synthesised in 1856. %
Experimenting in East London
{color:blueviolet} The story of mauveine’s inventor starts among the factories and docks of East London, with the birth of William Perkin in Shadwell in 1838. Perkin studied at the City of London school, then on Milk Street, where unusually for the time he received lessons in practical chemistry. The school’s archives hold some of Perkin’s notebooks, including those recording his 1856 breakthrough.
{color:blueviolet} Perkin joined the Royal College of Chemistry in 1853. Its first Director August Wilhelm Hofmann, was a pioneer of isolating the organic bases of coal-tar and a publicist for the utility of chemistry in industry. He set Perkin to work converting the hydrocarbons of coal tar into their nitrogen bases, the amines.
{color:blueviolet} Although coal tar research was fraught with dangers – a fellow student died as a result of a blaze in a still – Perkin set up his own laboratory in his house on Cable Street, using the fireplace as a furnace and a garden shed to work on combustion.
{color:blueviolet} Perkin, with his friend Arthur Church, published early experiments in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, but it was the search for an alternative to the anti-malarial derivative of the cinchona tree that prompted his breakthrough. During the Easter vacation of 1856, Perkins attempted unsuccessfully to synthesize quinine by oxidizing a salt of allyltoluidine with potassium dichromate. However, replacing the toluidine derivative with aniline yielded a solution that dyed silk ‘a very beautiful purple that resisted the light for a long time’.
The True Colours of Greenford Green
{color:blueviolet} In 1858, Perkin’s colourful trail wound west along the Grand Union Canal towards his factory at Greenford Green where mauveine, marketed until 1859 as ‘Tyrian purple’, was manufactured and improved. Meanwhile, mauve mania – or for Punch ‘mauve measles’ – swept London, flooding Perkin and Sons with commissions. Queen Victoria wore purple for her daughter’s marriage in 1858 and lilac dye was used in early postage stamps.
{color:blueviolet} As fickle fashion shifted towards scarlet, Perkin and Sons also moved across the spectrum to develop an economical method of producing red dye from the synthesis of alizarin, a derivative of the coal-tar hydrocarbon anthracene, publishing their results in the Journal of the Chemical Society of London. Crossing from sight to smell, in 1873 Perkin synthesised coumarin, a substance known for its pleasant scent, thus initiating the synthetic perfume industry.
Perkins’ Posterity
{color:blueviolet} Perkin’s achievement was celebrated during his life: he was knighted in 1906, elected to several scientific societies, received numerous medals and honorary doctorates, and met US President Theodore Roosevelt. Perkin’s purple left an indelible mark on the development of organic chemistry, demonstrating its industrial applications through his collaboration with industry.
%{color:blueviolet} By the time of Perkin’s burial in 1907 in Christchurch Cemetery there were more than 2,000 synthetic colours in production and the dyes had been used in 1897 to identify the cause of malarial transmission. Coal-tar derivatives later found applications in immunology, chemotherapy and bacteriology, as well as synthetic fibres and plastics. Meanwhile, Perkin’s legacy is undergoing a regal revival. As Imperial College celebrates its own centenary its graduates will be wearing purple gowns. %
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