The accidental purple that launched the chemical industry

HostThink about the clothes people wore way back in the eighteen fifties. If you weren’t rich, your world was pretty much beige, brown, or a dull kind of grey. Most people walked around in the same muddy tones as the dirt they stood on. Then, all of a sudden, this one teenager in London makes a mistake in his home lab and everything changes. He was trying to wash a thick, black, failed experiment out of a glass beaker when he noticed the residue was turning the water a brilliant, unearthly violet.

HostHow does a dirty beaker go from a failed science project to changing the way the whole world looks?

GuestIt sounds like a small thing, but you have to realize how stuck we were before that moment. For thousands of years, if you wanted color, you had to find it in nature. You had to crush up certain beetles for red or let plants sit and rot for blue. But purple was the biggest headache of all. The only way to get a deep, rich purple was Tyrian purple, and that was harvested from the glandular mucus of thousands of predatory sea snails. It took a mountain of snails just to dye one small piece of cloth. It was so hard to get and cost so much that some leaders even made laws saying only royalty could wear it.

HostThat sounds like an awful lot of work just for a shirt. I mean, why not just use a different plant? Surely there was an easier way to get a purple tint than snail slime.

GuestPeople tried, but natural dyes were just not very good. Most of them were what they called fugitive dyes. They would look okay for a day, but then they would fade fast in the sun or just wash out the first time it rained. You were trapped by whatever biology had already invented. We hadn’t learned how to build our own colors yet. So when eighteen year old William Henry Perkin saw that purple glow in his sink, he wasn't just looking at a pretty color. He was looking at the first time a human had made a complex organic molecule from a cheap, industrial waste product.

HostHold on. You said waste product. Where did the purple actually come from if it wasn't from a plant or a snail?

GuestThis is the part that's hard to wrap your head around. He was working with coal tar. It was this thick, foul smelling black sludge left over from making gas for street lights. It was basically trash. Perkin was actually trying to turn that sludge into a cure for malaria called quinine. He failed at that, obviously. But when he hit that mess with some alcohol to clean his glass, it turned this deep violet. He named it Mauveine. It was the first human made dye. It was stronger, it didn't fade in the sun, and because it came from coal waste, it was dirt cheap to make.

HostI’m still struggling to see how a kid with some oily sludge starts a revolution. Just because it’s cheap doesn't mean people will actually want to wear it. Usually, if something is cheap, the rich people at the top stay away from it.

GuestYou’re right, and that’s where Perkin showed he was more than just a chemist. He was a bit of a marketing whiz, too. He knew he needed the right people to wear it. The real break came when Empress Eugénie of France decided the color matched her eyes. Then Queen Victoria wore a mauve silk gown to her daughter’s royal wedding. Suddenly, everyone had to have it. It was like a fever. They even called it the Mauve Measles because it spread so fast. Since it could be mass produced in a factory, mauve became the first democratized luxury. For the first time in two thousand years, a regular person could wear a color that used to be for emperors only.

HostIt's a great story for the fashion world, but I keep thinking about what you said earlier about his lab work. It feels like a big leap to say a new dress color launched the whole modern chemical industry. Colors and things like medicine feel worlds apart.

GuestThey feel that way, but the bones of the work are the same. The success of that one purple dye proved that playing with the molecules in coal tar could make someone incredibly rich. It started a huge gold rush for new colors. But the way you move those molecules around to get a bright blue or a deep red is the exact same path you take to build a drug. The dye industry provided the structural blueprint and the revenue for the creation of the first synthetic drugs.

GuestThey used the same vats, the same labs, and the same tricks they learned from making purple to eventually create things like aspirin and the very first antibiotics. Every time we take a pill today, or even look at a bright piece of plastic, we're seeing the direct legacy of a teenager who failed to cure one disease and ended up building the modern world out of a beaker of black sludge.

HostIt's wild to think that our entire medicine cabinet started out as a way to make sure a silk dress didn't fade in the rain.