Ann Burnett, writer and tutor

Perkin's Purple

The first time William Perkin synthesised the colour purple in 1856 it was by accident.
He had been employed as an assistant by the scientist August Hofmann to search for a cure for malaria. He was attempting to synthesise quinine when he added aniline to his mixture and the result was a dark sludge at the foot of the beaker. He later described the discovery thus:
‘I was then eighteen. While working on an experiment, I failed, and was about to throw a certain black residue away when I thought it might be interesting. The solution of it resulted in a strangely beautiful colour. You know the rest.’
Perkin was struck by the intensity of its colour and its resistance to fading. He immediately realised its potential and wrote to a dyeworks in Perth to ask for help and advice. Robert Pullar, always on the look out for new methods of dyeing, offered to test out his product. Perkin patented his discovery and headed to Perth with his dye. Pullar was delighted with it and encouraged Perkin to develop it further so that, by the beginning of 1858, Perkin had left Hofmann’s employ and set up his own factory on the banks of the Grand Union Canal in London to produce the dyestuff. He could not have picked a better time to do so. The Industrial Revolution meant that coal tar, the raw material needed for his process, was being produced in large quantities as a waste product of the coal gas and coke industries.
Previously, purple was a colour worn only by the rich as it took around 12,000 molluscs to produce enough dye for one small garment. This was known as Tyrian purple. Later, a purple dye was obtained from the madder plant but the colour rapidly faded in sunlight.
The vibrant colour produced by Perkin’s dye was a revelation to the Victorians. By today’s standards, the colour shades were garish though perhaps less so by candle or gaslight, but were in complete contrast to the pale, washed out shades previously obtainable from plant dyes. And of course, the purple dye could be mass produced and made available to all. The 1860’s became known as the mauve decade after Queen Victoria wore a purple dress for the wedding of her daughter Princess Victoria in 1858. The queen had visited Paris where the French Empress, ‘the single most influential woman in fashion’, had introduced her to the colour called mauveine by Perkin.
Mauve, from the French word for the mallow plant, became the colour of half mourning after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. In 1862 at the opening of the London Exhibition, the queen wore ‘rich mauve velvet, trimmed with three rows of lace.’
Mauve was everywhere which led the magazine Punch to comment that it was like an outbreak of Mauve Measles. In Dickens’ weekly paper, All the Year Round, the colour was described as ‘waving on every fair head and fluttering round every cheek’.
But Perkin’s dye was more than simply a new fashion sensation. The discovery coincided with the development of the new science of microbiology and staining cells with the purple dye showed up their structures under the microscope. This enabled scientists to identify bacteria in tissue samplings including that for tuberculosis. In the twentieth century, further synthetic dyes were developed which have played their part in the treatment of pneumonia, diphtheria and cancer as well as in the discovery of DNA.
Perkin went on to manufacture other dyes using aniline as a basis, among them Britannia Violet and Perkin’s Green and discovered a method of commercially producing alizarin, a brilliant red. By 1906, fifty years after his initial discovery, over 2,000 artificial colours had been made.
Furthermore, it was realised that the study of chemistry had practical uses as well as being a means of making money and applied chemistry became an academic subject. Previously it had been regarded as not far removed from alchemy but now industry began employing chemists to synthesise other substances, including ammonia which was the basis of modern explosives.
When William Perkin said, ‘You know the rest,’ he could never have imagined even the half of it.