Today in History—August 26: Teenager Invents Purple

Well, that’s not what he was trying to do. But William Henry Perkin was a curious 18-year-old, and he was quick to embrace the accidental results of his experiment.

In doing so, he changed science and fashion forever.

The research assistant at the Royal College of Chemistry had a homework assignment for his Easter break in March: find a feasible, cheap way to produce quinine, the only malaria drug in existence at the time. It had to be extracted from tree bark, which was difficult and expensive.

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Working in his parents’ attic in London, Perkin began experimenting with aniline, a clear oil derived from coal tar—the leftover thick black goo from Victorian gas lighting. At the time, molecular structure wasn’t understood, but elements were, and both quinine and aniline contained carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. The theory was that if someone could add oxygen to aniline—the other component in quinine—maybe quinine would result.

Instead, another thick black goo resulted. A frustrated Perkin dumped it in the sink and rinsed with alcohol. The sink promptly turned purple, and so did a cloth he wiped it on. The resulting substance, he found, turned silk purple.

Perkin had accidentally invented the world’s first synthetic dye. And it was purple! At the time, the only way to achieve a purple colorant was to extract it from Mediterranean sea snails—which was about as painstaking and expensive and ridiculous of a process as you’d imagine.

He initially called his discovery Tyrian purple, after the famed ancient indigo dye, but he soon settled on the fancier French word mauve (formally mauveine).

On this day in 1856, he applied for a patent for it, detailing his process in the paperwork. (So much so that some modern chemists have tried to recreate his experiments exactly.)

Mauveine would become one of the world’s first commercially successful and mass-produced dyes. Perkin dropped out of school and, using a loan from his father, set up a factory to manufacture his creation. In addition to making Perkin a wealthy man, his dye introduced a whole new industry and took coal tar from a waste product to a valuable raw material. It wouldn’t be long before synthetic dyes were transforming the chemical industry and the way people dressed.

Famous Birthdays

1890: Duke Kahanamoku—Hawaiian surfer and swimmer who won three gold medals for the United States

1918: Katherine Johnson—American mathematician whose work helped send astronauts to the Moon

1970: Melissa McCarthy—American actress

1980: Macaulay Culkin—American actor