Mauveine and the aniline dyes
An 18-year-old chasing a malaria drug made purple instead, and launched the chemical industry.
- Made from
- Aniline from coal tar, oxidized
- Discovered
- Easter 1856, by an 18-year-old
- Name
- French mauve, the mallow flower
In the Easter holidays of 1856, William Perkin, an 18-year-old student of the chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, was trying to make quinine, the malaria drug, from coal-tar chemicals in his home lab in east London. One attempt left a black sludge. Cleaning it out with alcohol, he saw a vivid purple. It dyed silk and didn't wash out.
It was not the very first synthetic dye: picric acid, a yellow, was dyeing silk in Lyon from 1845. Mauveine was the first aniline dye, made from coal tar, and it became a fashion sensation. Perkin patented it that August, and in 1857 opened a dye works at Greenford, west of London. Perkin first marketed it as 'Tyrian purple', and it was also called aniline purple; by 1859 it was mauve, after the French word for the mallow flower. Empress Eugénie and Queen Victoria wore the color, the crinoline's huge skirts used yards of cloth, and by 1859 the craze was so big that Punch joked about 'the mauve measles'.
Mauveine opened the floodgates. Chemists across Europe raced to make new colors from aniline. In France, François-Emmanuel Verguin made a red-purple he called fuchsine; a British firm sold a similar dye as roseine, then, by 1860, as magenta, after the Battle of Magenta in June 1859. Then came synthetic alizarin reds and, by 1897, synthetic indigo. Germany came to dominate the industry.
The result was a democratization of color. Purples that once needed sea snails were now a few pence a ribbon (see purple and power), though dye workers paid a price: aniline dye work was later linked to bladder cancer. The app's mauve today is a soft greyish purple, much duller than Perkin's original bright violet-purple.
Swatches
- Mauveine · Perkin's purple (approx.)
- Magenta · fuchsine, 1859
- Mauve · today's soft meaning
Colors
Sources
- Garfield, S. (2000). Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World. Faber & Faber.
- Royal Society of Chemistry. William Henry Perkin and mauveine.
- Wikipedia, 'Mauveine', 'William Henry Perkin' and 'Magenta'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.