As a new understanding of the chemical nature of dyes began to emerge, the attention of the scientific community in the early decades of the nineteenth century began to be focused on isolating the coloring matters in dyes in an effort to reproduce them artificially in laboratories.  The research was still largely empirical and advanced through trial-and-error.  Even with the 1856 discovery of the aniline dye, mauveine -- a compound that did not exist in nature -- theoretical understanding came after the fact and the discovery was purely accidental.(1)

Among the earliest discoveries that would initiate the progressively artificial ways to process natural dyestuffs was the isolation in 1820 or 1827 (2) of alizarin, the compound in the madder root that produces the color red.  Extracted through complex chemical processes, the first attempt at alizarin's chemical formulation was not proposed until 1850 (3) and its true synthesis did not occur until 1868.  Other natural products such as coal were at the source of great advancements in the field of chemistry and color.  Used to light lamps and for heating as early as 1805, coal gas gained popularity during the 1830s and caused many chemists to ponder as to the potential usefulness of its tarry residue.(4)  As luck would have it, an eighteen-year-old working in his parents' garden shed would soon stumbled across a reddish-brown sludge extracted from a coal-tar product that would cause a fashion phenomenon.

William Perkin was a gifted young student of August Wilhelm Hofmann, the first director of the Royal College of Chemistry in London where, starting in 1845, many young pupils were mentored in the mysteries of coal-tar hydrocarbons.(5)  Although Perkin would become famous in 1856 for his mauveine aniline dye, it was Frédéric Crace Calvert, educated in France and appointed as a professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution in Manchester in 1846 that cracked the code to create the first purple and red aniline dyes in 1854.(6)  Unlike Crace Calvert, Perkin saw potential in the reddish-brown sludge he obtained while attempting to produce synthetic quinine at Hofmann's suggestion.(7)  In 1856 the Perkin family launched a factory which had to compete with other producers of semi-synthetic purple dyes, namely murexide, commercialized in 1853 and synthesized from the uric acid of solidified droppings of the Peruvian guano bird (8), and French Purple, processed from lichens in 1856 (9) and known as mauve in France -- a term used by Perkins to secure a French connection to his product and thus a link to the world of fashion.(10)

Perkins worked relentlessly to solve the problems of aniline dyes and make them commercially viable.  The first problem was the dye's lack of solidity on fibers other than silk, namely cotton and wool, the former being solved by mordanting procedures found in 1857.(11)  The second problem was costs: as aniline required a multistep synthesis, it was an expensive substance to produce on an industrial scale.(12)  Perkins found processing shortcuts through the use of benzene, which was cheap yet hazardous and in need of further refining. (BE, 213)  By the late 1850s and 1860s, mauve became the indisputable color of high fashion and Perkin overtook his competitors.(13)

Other aniline colors soon followed that caused tidal waves in fashion.  1859 saw the arrival of François-Emmanuel Verguin's fuchsine and Edward Chambers Nicholson's roseine, known soon after as magenta.(14)  By 1860, the recipe for magenta was accidentally altered by Charles Girard and Georges de Laire to produce aniline blue.(15) Hofmann contributed aniline violet in 1863, thus infiltrating Perkin's market.(16)

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(1) Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001), 216, 220.
(2) For 1820 see Ball, 219.For 1827 see Agustí Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 97
(3) Ball, 219.
(4) Ibid., 208.
(5) Ibid., 209.
(6) Nieto-Galan, 128; Ball, 210..
(7) Ball, 211.
(8) Ibid., 210.
(9) Nieto-Galan, 188.
(10) Ball, 210, 213.
(11) Ibid., 213.
(12) Ibid., 212.
(13) Ibid., 213.
(14) Ibid., 214.
(15) Ibid., 214-215.
(16) Ibid., 214.