The Color Purple - A Victorian Innovation Story

 

    For this post, I wanted to write on something that I was not aware of as an accident.  Because so many of our modern inventions are spoken about incessantly, I had to go back a little further, to Victorian England and the emergence of modern chemistry and its effect on the world of fashion.

            William Henry Perkin was an 18-year-old college student enrolled at London’s Royal College of Chemistry in the year 1856.  During this period, exploration of Africa was exploding as the discovery of Quinine had allowed European colonizers to effectively treat malaria and it was no longer a fatal illness.  The Dutch had cornered the market on the primary ingredient of quinine, cinchona bark, and other imperial powers of the time were seeking other ways to create quinine without the use of this required ingredient.  (Quinine., 2021) Enter Mr. Perkin, young, eager to impress his teacher with an inquisitive mind, a willingness to experiment with his chemistry set at home and an impossible task: to find a cheap way to produce quinine without cinchona bark.

            One of Perkin’s experiments towards this end was to use coal tar, the substance that remains when Victorian gas lighting is used.  At the time, chemists believed coal tar and quinine were made up of the same chemicals or were of similar structures.  After experimenting with the coal tar, he was unsuccessful in transforming it into quinine, rather his alchemy has altered it into a thick black goo, a far cry from the clear property of quinine.    Likely disappointed, he went to clean up his experiment and found the residue was a brilliant purple color, it was easily transferred to cloth and the cloth retained the stain.  Mr. Perkin had figured out a way to create industrial dye in large quantities and with brilliant and colorful properties.  Mauve was born…right into the largest cultural fashion craze of the time as purple was the most desired, most expensive, and typically dull and quick to fade with the existing natural dyes.  Mauve made form Perkin’s process was cheap, brilliant and the first synthetic dye in history.  Now, a regular woman of the period could afford to wear the most fashionable styles as they suddenly became affordable to the masses. (CNN., 2017)

            Mr. Perkin’s discovery destroyed an industry that used natural materials to make dyes and in the process was able to bring about efficiencies in production and cost savings to build a business.  In fact, during a period where chemistry was looked upon as a scientific curiosity with no material value, he monetized it and built an industry out of producing synthetic dyes.  He could not have come upon this invention at a better time. Not only was purple the choice of color in the spring of 1856, he was also physically located in the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the manufacturing efficiencies of process gained from the same.  (CNN., 2017)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References:

Quinine. (2021, April 28). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinine

The color purple: How an accidental discovery changed fashion forever. (2017, August 29). In CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/perkin-mauve-purple/index.html