The purple color of this Victorian dress testifies to the discovery of “mauve,” the world’s first synthetic dye. And it was a really, really big deal.
The color was produced serendipitously by a brilliant 18-year old named William Henry Perkin in 1856, who didn’t start out his career path to become the millionaire founder of the chemical dying industry. Instead, he was assisting his professor in the attempt to make a synthetic form of quinine for the British troops suffering from malaria in areas they were trying to colonize. Quinine was the only treatment, but it was very expensively produced from the bark of the cinchona tree in the Andes.
Perkin sought a way to use the abundance of coal tar left over as waste from the industrial application of coal gas — the coal tar had aniline compounds that, mixed with alcohol, ended up creating a brilliant purple to a piece of fabric that Perkin applied it to: one that wouldn’t wash off.
Purple of course has been the color of royalty, highly expensive to make a dye with before Perkin came along. The mollusks that the Ancient Phonecians had used to create the Tyrian purple dye had been hunted down to near extinction. In England the dyers had turned to guano — bat manure– for the color. And France was using a type of lichen. Perkin’s purple, which he called mauve after the French word for the (similarly colored) mallow flower, became wildly popular. Queen Victoria wore a gown of this hue to a 1865 exhibition, and around this time so too did the Empress consort of Napoleon III, Eugénie of France, favor the shade. “Mauve mania” had begun.
Perkin quickly patented his method, but other chemically minded entrepreneurs developed anologous synthetic dyes — in fact, Germany soon led the way in this industry. Don’t feel sorry for Perkin, though: he became a millionaire.
More importantly, Perkin’s work with mauve yielded important scientific discoveries — the dye could color cells to be studied under a microscope. And in 1905, Robert Koch recurved the Nobel Prize for discovering the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis by coloring infected liquid with the dye.
The path of invention often depends on such serendipity.
Sources: @openmindbbva.com, “Mauve: the history of the colour that revolutionized the world,” 13 July 2018, Bibiana García Visos. JSTOR Daily, “The accidental invention of the color mauve,” Matthew Wills, Sept 28, 2021. Erica scholar, Errata on that last one, “American Scholar,” “How mauve was her garment: the effect of coal tar in Queen Victoria’s gown,” Pricilla Long, June 19, 2013 and @bligsciencemuaeum.org.uk, ‘Mauve Mania” by Sophie Waring, 12 March 2018
