William Perkin
At 18, in a makeshift home lab, he failed to make a malaria drug and made the color mauve instead.
- Lived
- 1838–1907
- Discovery
- Mauveine, Easter 1856, aged 18
- Honors
- Knighted 1906; first Perkin Medal
William Henry Perkin (1838–1907) entered London's Royal College of Chemistry at 15 to study under August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Over the Easter holiday of 1856, aged 18, he was trying to make quinine, the malaria drug, in a crude lab at his family home in east London. He got a black sludge instead; washed out with alcohol, it gave a brilliant purple, mauveine.
He saw the business before most chemists would have. With his brother and a friend he tested it on silk, sent samples to a dye works in Perth, patented it in August 1856, and in 1857 opened a factory at Greenford, west of London. Mauve became a craze. Local lore says the canal beside his works changed color from week to week.
His success started the synthetic dye industry: magenta, aniline blues and greens, synthetic alizarin red (Perkin found a process in 1869, but BASF patented the same one a day earlier) and eventually synthetic indigo. As Germany came to dominate the business, Perkin left manufacturing and went back to research, finding ways to make coumarin, an early synthetic perfume ingredient.
He was knighted in 1906, the 50th anniversary of mauve, and received the first Perkin Medal, still among the highest honors in American industrial chemistry. His accident turned purple, once the color of emperors and sea snails, into something anyone could wear.
Swatches
- Mauveine · 1856 (approx.)
- Mauve · the word today
- Magenta · the next aniline hit
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 (1838–1907).
- Wikipedia, 'William Henry Perkin'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.