Who invented purple dye

Perkin, at the age of 36, sold his business so that he could devote himself entirely to research, which included early investigations of the ability of some organic chemicals to rotate plane-polarized light, a property used in considering questions of molecular structure. In the Society of Chemical Industry created the Perkin Medal to commemorate the discovery of mauve and awarded the first medal to its namesake at a banquet in his honor.

His experiment failed but left behind an oily residue that stained silk a brilliant purple. He called the dye mauveine. He applied for a patent and abandoned the lab for the path of manufacturing. He paved the way for modern chemistry to move into industrial applications, and indirectly led to advances in modern medicine, explosives, photography, and plastics.

First appearing in Paris and London, it quickly spread to America and was heavily featured in popular women's magazines of the day. Synthetic dyes became big business after , with Germany in the lead.

Privacy Policy Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

The synthetic transformation of the world had begun. Join our new membership program on Patreon today. JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. Sample of Perkin's Mauve. Courtesy Science History Institute. By: Matthew Wills. September 28, September 23, Perkin, who would be years old today, was a chemist who pioneered synthetic purple dye.

It changed the history of clothes. In , the precocious scientist William Henry Perkin failed in an experiment to synthetically produce quinine, a chemical that helps treat malaria.

Instead of quinine, his beakers were left filled with a dirty brown sludge. But something amazing happened when Perkin, who was only 18 at the time, cleaned out those beakers with alcohol. The brown sludge became a bright, rich fuchsia-purple dye.

The element cadmium, for instance, can be ground down to make bright reds, oranges, and yellows. Lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone, creates deep ultramarine blues. These natural purple dyes also faded rapidly, the Yale chemistry department explains on its website.

Mauveine was a more permanent stain. And the discovery changed everything, beginning a long chain of chemistry advances that would make bright, inexpensive synthetic color available to the masses.