How mauve put Perkin in the pink
London Regional Group: The 150th anniversary of the discovery of mauve
University College, London, UK
A lecture given to a joint meeting of the SCI London Regional Group and University College Chemical and Physical Society, on 23 March in the Ramsay Lecture Theatre, University College, London, celebrated the discovery of mauve a century and a half ago.
At Easter 1856, a teenaged chemical inventor discovered by chance in his makeshift home laboratory in London a process that converted aniline, made from coal-tar benzene, into a purple dyestuff, or colorant. The young man was William Henry Perkin (1838-1907), assistant to the German chemist August Wilhelm Hoffman, then head of the Royal College of Chemistry. Perkin filed a patent for the process and product, overcame the difficult problem of attachment of his dye to cotton and, in partnership with his father and a brother, started manufacture at a small factory they erected northwest of the metropolis.
From 1859, Perkin’s colorant was known as mauve. Other aniline dyes soon followed. During 1869-70 synthetic alizarin, the first natural product of some complexity to be synthesised, was manufactured by Perkin in London and by the newly created BASF in Ludwigshafen.
It is difficult to convey now the day-to-day excitement that infused the academic and industrial laboratories that pursued the novel products during the half century following Perkin’s discovery. The endeavour made reputations and attracted the greatest stars of organic chemistry, including Hofmann, Adolf Baeyer and Emil Fischer. No less profound were the economic and political consequences. The synthetic dyestuffs and their intermediates would make tremendous contributions to material wellbeing. Quite apart from providing routes to synthetic dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, explosives, rubber products and new polymers, they revolutionised the study of chemistry, led to the inauguration of industrial research laboratories, and helped forge academic-industrial collaborations. As agents of modernity, they forced changes in patent law, fostered technology transfer, and decimated cultivation of dye-yielding plants. They contributed to the growth of Germany as a major economic power.
After the coal-tar dye industry was adopted by the US, from 1915, its mode of applied research led to the discovery of synthetic polymers and new agrochemicals. Apart from the intrinsic chemical interest in the early story of aniline dyes, these few facts make a compelling reason for a historical introduction to the emergence of the modern organic chemical industry.
Anthony Travis,
Edelstein Center,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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