William Henry Perkin
The East End has long been a place of innovation and invention, but there can surely be only one East Ender who can lay claim to having invented a colour.
Like much in science however, this invention (or discovery) owed as much to happy accident as design. It may not be as dramatic as Bequerel’s stumbling across radioactivity, Nobel accidentally inventing gelignite, or Roy Plunkett getting the recipe wrong and coming up with Teflon - but ‘mauve’ was to make young William Henry Perkin’s fortune.
William was born in Wapping in 1838, the youngest of seven children of a prosperous carpenter, and was baptised at St Paul’s parish church on Ratcliffe Highway (now simply The Highway). A bright lad, he won a scholarship to the City of London School, where he fell under the influence of teacher Thomas Hall. Hall spotted a keen scientific brain, and persuaded William to pursue a career in chemistry. The young William was already experimenting, as evidenced by surviving self portraits he took with his own camera, and which he developed himself, aged just 14.
At just 15, William enrolled in the Royal College of Chemistry, then based in Oxford Street, and now part of Imperial College London. He studied under August Wilhelm von Hofmann, the first director of the college, in what was still a fledgling science. It was little more than half a century since scientists had started to overturn the old alchemical theories which had prevailed since the time of Ancient Greece - and which held that all matter was composed of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.
Von Hofmann was a champion of organic chemistry. New discoveries were being made all the time, and he challenged his students to synthesise the anti-malaria drug quinine - which would be a godsend to people in South and Central America, Asia and Africa. Quinine had first been extracted from the cinchona tree some 40 years before, but in his attempt to artificially create the magic medicine Perkin got his formula wrong. Attempting to oxidise aniline with potassium dichromate, the 18 year old instead ended up with a black gloop in his test tube.
This was, in truth, not unexpected, being the result of most failed experiments in the hit and miss world of organic chemistry. But this time, as William cleaned out his flask with alcohol, he noticed that the black mass dissolved to a purple liquid.
Perkin experimented with the solution, back in the family home in Cable Street, Playing around with it, he found it an effective fabric dye. William, who was still keenly interested in painting and photography, immediately saw the potential. He carried on the experiments (in secret from his teachers at college) with his brother Thomas and a friend Arthur Church. The three tested the stuff on silk and began to realise that the colour was fast in the wash and the light. Sending samples to a dye works in Perthshire they got their confirmation. It was an enormous leap forward both for fabrics and for organic chemistry - and it would give birth to the giant chemical industry we have today.
Perkin’s timing was perfect. The growth of manufacturing in Britain, of new consumer goods and a surge in exports created a big demand for scientific innovations. And by another happy accident, coal tar (the main source of his raw material) was a cheap and plentiful waste product of the growing coal gas and coke industry.
But Perkin had a business as well as a scientific brain. He patented his synthetic purple, and the following year opened a dye works on the banks of the Grand Union Canal in Greenford, west London, with money borrowed from his father. His brothers came into business with him, and he even showed a flair for marketing the new dye. The colour soon became known as ‘mauve’ and stormed the fashion world in 1862 when Queen Victoria wore a gown of mauve silk to the Royal Exhibition.
It seems a slim product line on which to build a business, and by the late 1860s numerous other synthetic dyes entered the fray, with mauve falling out of fashion. By now though, the Wapping carpenter’s son was a rich man. Becoming perhaps the first scientist to escape the lab and enter the world of marketing and manufacture, he was a novelty even among the enterprising Victorians. By now, having invented the modern chemical business, Perkin was developing new dyes and products, but he found it increasingly difficult to compete with the new giant German firms, such as BASF, who were increasingly dominating the business he had created.
In 1874 he sold up, rich beyond his dreams, to devote the rest of his life to scientific research. He was still just 35. He would die in 1907 as Sir William Perkin.