If you look at a painting from before, say, the 1880s, you might notice that anyone without boatloads of money wore pretty drab stuff. Beige, gray, black, and sometimes a blue or pink item to pop. Back then, dyes were produced from natural sources and the labor to make them was intensive. An 18-year-old chemist changed all of that, bringing new hues to the masses, when he patented a commercially successful synthetic dye on accident on this day in 1856.
The first synthetic dye emerged in 1771, but it took over seven decades for it to be produced for sale to consumers. The issue was that it wasn’t very useful; it worked only on silk (not exactly the cheapest or most accessible fabric out there) and faded quickly.
It was the teenage William Perkin who discovered a more lasting dye. He’d set out to find a cheap way to produce the malaria treatment quinine, which at that point could only be created through a laborious, expensive process working with tree bark. Perkin theorized that he could combine oxygen with aniline oil (an extract from the coal tar left behind by gas lamps) to create the drug. One day, after another failed attempt, he poured his mixture down the drain and washed his hands with alcohol. Suddenly, the sink turned purple.
For centuries, purple dye had been so rare and expensive that royals from the Mediterranean region all the way to Japan wore it to showcase their enormous wealth. Now, it could be produced on the cheap. Perkin’s “mauve” dye became so popular that he dropped out of school and built a factory to produce it.
He got rich quick, and businesses across the British Isles copied his process and began producing other colors out of otherwise-useless coal tar. Dyes became a big industry quickly, and over the decades colorful clothes went from a statement of power to an everyday norm.
