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In 1856, a young chemistry whiz failed so spectacularly at whipping up a cure for malaria, he accidentally invented the color mauve. Or, rather, a mauve-colored dye. And yeah, a scientist accidentally inventing a thing isn't surprising at all. Penicillin was an accident. Super glue was an accident. But mauve is in a league all by itself. Because basically, thanks to mauve, an entirely new field of science opened up for study. And the ability to invent even more chemicals you would not think have anything to do with color. Like perfumes. And pesticides. And the pills inside your medicine cabinet right now.
[♪ INTRO] In the 19th century, malaria was no joke. Even in Europe, where you might not think malaria would be a huge problem, it was killing thousands of people per year. And at the time, the best treatment was a compound called quinine. If that word sounds familiar, it might be because you've bought some tonic water, recently. Quinine is what gives it that slightly bitter taste. In nature, quinine comes from the bark of the cinchona tree, which is native to South America. Native peoples in the Andes used it in medicines, and when European colonists arrived, they also started using it to treat fever and malaria. As such a valuable resource, Spain kept a tight control over the distribution of quinine.
Great Britain eventually got their hands on some smuggled cinchona seeds to grow their own trees elsewhere. But before they managed that, some chemists thought maybe…just maybe… they could synthesize the molecules themselves. Enter: a young chemistry enthusiast by the name of William Henry Perkin. Perkin had first gotten into chemistry around age 13, when a friend showed him some cool experiments about growing crystals. He went to college for chemistry just two years later, in 1853. At this point in history, chemistry as a whole was still a pretty new field. For example, the modern idea of an atom was less than half a century old,
and it was only a few decades before that when natural philosophers figured out why stuff burns. And the field of organic chemistry, the study of carbon-based materials, was just getting started. But that did not stop Perkin. He started working with a chemist named August Wilhelm von Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry in London. And one day, Hofmann suggested Perkin try to make quinine in the lab. Now, that is easier said than done. For one thing, at this point, chemists only knew the chemical composition of quinine: 20 carbon atoms, 24 hydrogen atoms, two nitrogen atoms, and two oxygen atoms.
They did not know how all of those atoms were arranged. They didn't know the shape of the molecule, or how everything was connected. Which is…pretty important if you want to make it from scratch. And on top of that, Hofmann and Perkin wanted to make quinine from a specific starting material. Something inexpensive and readily available: coal tar. It's about as disgusting as it sounds. Coal tar was the thick, black, leftover gunk from creating a fuel source called coke and coal gas… a blend of gases that people piped into their homes to fuel lamps and run appliances.
How could coal tar possibly produce a malaria treatment? Well, Perkin knew the chemical composition of a compound in coal tar called allyltoluidine: 10 carbon atoms, 13 hydrogens, and one nitrogen atom. In other words, it has about half the number of each type of atom in quinine. Perkin figured he could just stick two molecules of allyltoluidine together to get something pretty close to quinine. And to get the oxygen he also needed, he would just add another ingredient to the reaction. Unfortunately, we know today that this would never have worked.
Quinine and allyltoluidine have very different structures. The atoms are connected in different ways, and you just can't reshape molecules that easily. But hey, it was the 19th century, so that's, like, a pretty good first guess. So Perkin's first experiment did not pan out. He then decided to start with a simpler coal tar ingredient called aniline. And that experiment…didn't work either. Instead of making quinine, he ended up with a bunch of black gunk. Most chemists would have declared the experiment a failure, and thrown out the black stuff, and tried again. But not Perkin.
He kept poking around with his weird product, and he found that if he mixed that black gunk with methanol and separated it out from everything else, he ended up with a purple dye. Which is way more exciting than it might sound. Artificial dyes were a fairly new technology at the time. We'd had natural dyes for ages, of course, but they were not perfect. Some were toxic. Some washed out pretty easily. And overall, we didn't have enough dyes to cover the full range of colors people wanted.
Amazing technicolor dreamcoats were a fantasy that would have to wait for the 1970s…in London's West End theater. By the mid-19th century, we had a few synthetic shades of red and purple. And back in 1771, a guy named Peter Woulfe had made a yellow dye called picric acid by adding some acid to indigo. Someone even went on to make picric acid from coal tar, kind of like Perkin was doing. But picric acid wasn't that great of a dye. In fact, it turned out to work better as an explosive. Fortunately, Perkin's new purple dye didn't have any of those problems. It stuck to silk really well, it didn't fade in the sun, and it definitely didn't explode.
He initially called his invention "aniline purple," after the compound he used to make it… or "Tyrian purple," after a natural purple dye made from the mucus of sea snails. But honestly? "Aniline purple" is kind of ironic, because the aniline Perkin used was actually contaminated with a different compound called toluidine. And toluidine wound up being much more reactive than aniline, helping to produce a better color than pure aniline could manage on its own. In 1857, Perkin received a British patent for his dye.
He also tried to get a French patent, but someone messed up the paperwork, and it fell through. Free to make as much as they wanted without violating their nation's intellectual property laws, French dyers started calling the dye "mauvéine," because it was a similar color to the flowers of the wild mallow plant. And "Mauve" means "mallow" in French. Meanwhile, Perkin took advantage of the patent he did have. And he dropped out of school and teamed up with his brother to open his own manufacturing plant.
This was a huge gamble. Perkin didn't have any experience in the textile industry. Or in running a business, for that matter. He had to convince his dad to give him a sizable loan to get his plant up and running. And what's more, the yields he was getting at the time were terrible. To get a single gram of mauveine dye, he would need to process like 690 grams of coal tar! Oh, and even if they had enough dye, by the time Perkin & Sons opened, the actual dyers hadn't yet figured out the best way to dye fabrics with the invention Perkin had just sunk everything into!
Despite these challenges, he made it work. Somehow. And for a hot minute, mauve was all the rage. Empress Eugénie of France loved the color. Queen Victoria wore a mauve dress to her daughter's wedding. Mauveine was even used to dye postage stamps until the 1880s. But like so many trends before and since, mauve eventually went out of style. By the time it did, chemists had come up with plenty of other bright colors in the lab. Perkin, to his credit, didn't seem to care all that much about mauveine falling out of favor.
He really just wanted to putter around in a lab. Despite the ramp-up in demand, he sold the factory in 1873 so he could retire and focus on chemistry research full-time. But Perkin & Sons wasn't the only enterprise leaning into the synthetic dye market. Chemical companies in France and especially Germany were creating and producing more and more dyes to keep up with the demand for new synthetic colors. You have definitely heard of one of those companies: Bayer. That's right, the folks behind Aspirin got their start as a dye-making business! And as the years progressed, it was clear coal tar could be turned into more than just dye.
The field of synthetic organic chemistry truly flourished. For example, Perkin himself developed turned coal tar derivatives into one of the first synthetic perfumes: a chemical called coumarin. He never commercialized it, but someone else later used it in a perfume designed to smell like freshly mown hay. And in 1879, a Russian chemist named Constantin Fahlberg developed saccharin: an artificial sweetener about 550 times more potent than sugar. Just like Perkin, his discovery came about by accident. Other scientists made explosives, pesticides, detergents… and of course, medicine. In 1874, a German scientist named Hermann Kolbe figured out how to
make a synthetic version of salicylic acid from coal tar. Today, salicylic acid is used in a lot of skincare products. It also worked as a treatment for rheumatism, but it had one inconvenient side effect: it really upset patients' stomachs. So those dyemakers over at Bayer…who opened a pharmaceutical division in 1888… wanted a compound that worked just as well, but without the tummy troubles. An employee named Felix Hoffman stepped up. In 1897, he managed to stick an acetyl group onto the salicylic acid molecule.
He had made acetylsalicylic acid, which Bayer branded and sold as Aspirin. The medicine worked really well, and Bayer started marketing it in Europe and the US a few years later. And Aspirin was far from the only medical compound to come out of this organic chemistry boom…be it from coal tar specifically, or other readily available gunk like crude oil. Researchers made pain killers, vitamins, synthetic hormones, anesthesia, and more. When they found a molecule that stained fabric or treated a sick person's symptoms, they'd
test the variants of that molecule to see if those modifications did anything useful or interesting. Not everything worked out, of course. But sometimes they'd land on something exciting. And then they'd test the variants of that molecule, and on. Some even worked as both dyes and medicines. For example, methylene blue, as the name implies, turns fabric blue. But researchers also found that it stains parasites blue in tissue samples. And in a weird twist of fate, scientists found methylene blue could also kill the parasite that causes malaria. So even though Perkin's initial experiments at making quinine in the lab did not pan out, the dye industry found a solution in the end.
And speaking of quinine, even with all the developments that followed from mauveine, it took almost 90 years before a couple Harvard chemists figured out how to finally make the pesky compound. They did not, however, actually make it. Instead, they made a chemical called d-quinotoxine. And then they pointed to another paper published a few decades earlier where researchers converted d-quinitoxine into quinine. In theory, it should have worked. But as far as we know, they never confirmed it did. And when a separate research group finally published the first complete synthesis of quinine in 2001… it was by a different route.
It took all the way until 2008 for someone to go back and check that the original procedure actually did what it was supposed to do. And people are still coming up with new ways to make quinine, today. Perkin probably would not have guessed that a few extra experiments would crack open an entire field of chemistry and eventually lead to the development of some life-saving medicines. That's one heck of a butterfly effect. But there's something to be said for indulging a bit of good old-fashioned scientific curiosity. You never know what could happen.
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