Mauve

'It is rich and pure, and fit for anything; be it fan, slipper, gown, ribbon, handkerchief, tie or glove.  It will lend lustre to the soft changeless twilight of ladies' eyes - it will take any shape to find an excuse to flutter round her cheek, to cling (as the wind blows it) up to her lips - to kiss her foot - to whisper at her ear.  O Perkin's purple, thou art a lucky and favoured colour.' - Charles Dickens


Dickens may have been guilty of deliberate hyperbole.  But he appreciated that William Henry Perkin had made an important contribution to British fashion and industry with the dye he accidentally invented.  Perkin, an eighteen-year-old chemistry student, was eager to discover a way to synthesize quinine.  But the result of his curiosity was not what he expected. 

William Henry Perkin was born in 1838, baptized in Shadwell, at the same church Thomas Jefferson's mother Jane Randolph had been baptized.  His father did well running a carpentry business, well enough to send Perkin, his youngest (of seven) children to private school.  At fifteen he continued his education at the Royal College of Chemistry, London, studying under the 'brilliant' German-born chemist August Wilhelm von Hoffman.  

Hoffman had long had an interest in aniline (a derivative of coal tar) as well as quinine.  Quinine was first isolated in 1820 but was expensive and had not yet been synthesized.  Perkin, too, was intrigued.  He was doing well at RCC and Hoffman had made him one of his assistants.  

Malaria was not as common in England as it had been during the 'Little Ice Age' in England (1564 - c1740).  Chaucer wondered if malaria was the matter in the Nun Priest's Tale ('Or some ague may well be your bane.')  Stefano of The Tempest (believed to have been a thinly-disguised Stephen Hopkins of the Mayflower) attempts to cure Caliban - who he falsely believes has malaria - with a stiff drink: '...if all the wine in my bottle will recover him, I will help his ague.'  Daniel Defoe, writing in 1727, was struck by the ravages of malaria in Essex, where a sufferer may have sought comfort in opiate-infused beer: there were poppy fields in the vicinity.   

In 1856, eighteen-year-old Perkin, taking a break in his studies for Easter, was experimenting with aniline in the simple laboratory he'd set up on the top floor of the family house in Cable Street.  If not for Hoffman, would he have been experimenting with aniline? (Aniline is the colourless component of coal tar.)  Hoffman had researched coal tar and aniline extensively; it was he who piqued Perkin's interest in the possibility of synthesising quinine.  So that Easter, Perkin extracted (or separated) aniline with ethynol, leaving him with a bottle of black liquid.  Hardly promising.  Even so, Perkin decided to purify it, then allow it to dry.  He seems to have had a hunch that the liquid might serve as a dye.  (Why exactly is anyone's guess.)   And all likelihood he was expecting a black dye.  Instead, he was dazzled by a length of gleaming, vividly purple silk.  He had just produced the first aniline dye.  

No fool, Perkin knew he'd stumbled on to a proverbial gold mine.  He did not trust Hoffman.  Nor did he confide in his father.  Realising he needed help, Perkin confided two men who could (and would) help him: his brother Thomas and a friend, Arthur Church (who would formulate a dye himself).  Worried that Hoffman would hear about the dye, Perkin insisted that any further experiments be conducted in secrecy, setting up a laboratory in the garden shed.  With the assistance of his brother and Arthur Church, Perkin discovered that the dye worked beautifully on wool as well as silk, saturating textiles evenly and deeply.  Almost as important, Perkin's dye held fast.  But it did not work on cotton, quite a disappointment considering how popular cotton was at the time.  

Satisfied that his dye worked well. Perkin wrote to Robert Pullan, the manager of a Scottish dye works, enclosing a sample of dyed silk.  Pullan was impressed: 


'If your discovery does not make the goods too expensive,' he wrote, 'it is decidedly one of the most valuable that has come out for a very long time. This colour is one which has been very much wanted in all classes of goods, and could not be obtained fast on silks, and only at great expense on cotton yarns.'


Perkin needed no further encouragement: he filed a patent within weeks, aware that his student days were over.  He withdrew from the Royal College of Chemistry, much to the annoyance of Hoffman, who wanted his best students to become academics, not enter the all-powerful world of Victorian industry.  To be fair, Hoffman may have been apprehensive: another student had exchanged academia for industry, only to be burned alive in a related accident. 

For his part, Perkin was upset: he did not want to be rejected by his fellow men of science.  But that fear was less important than a problem he had to solve, and quickly: mauveine was an expensive dye.  And Pullan had stressed that mauveine had to be cost-effective.  So Perkin worked round the clock, putting in eighteen-hour days and in the end, synthesized a less expensive version of his 'aniline purple' dye.  By 1857, it was put to use in a factory in London.   Two years later it was called 'mauve' (later mauveine) the French name for the brilliant purple mallow flower, the exact shade Perkin's dye produced.  

© Katja Anderson 2020