THE BIRTH OF DYEING

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 100, 30 April 1938, Page 26

THE BIRTH OF DYEING

Everyone with an eye for colour should be grateful for the birth, a hundred years ago, of William Henry Perkin, the famous chemist and founder of the aniline dye industry, says the "Manchester Guardian," Perkin must have been a precocious youth, because he was only eighteen when he discovered his first mineral dye—a mauve—formed oy the oxidation of aniline. A little later he elaborated two processes of manufacturing artificial alizarin (hitherto extracted from madder) coal-tar, thus setting the milfera'l-dye business on a commercial footing.

Although, of course, Perkin soon began to make other colours besides mauve, it was that first shade which caught the public fancy—that, and the wonder of such a colour coming from coal. For a time, it seems, the new mauve dye was the subject of conversation almost everywhere, and a contemporary writer reports that even the Drury Lane pantomime took notice of the craze. A character, complaining that people talked to him of. nothing else but mauve, exclaimed: "Why, even the copper at the cor,ner of the street says, 'Mauve on' "—a pun which shows that pantomimes haven't changed much. There is no actual evidence, however, that it was . Per-

kin's mauve dye that inspired Alfred Austin's remarkable couplet:— Winter is gone, and spring is over: The cuckoo flower grows mauver and mauver.

Not all Perkin's mineral dyes were a success at once and from all points of view. Ladies of the day who

"bought stockings of the most remarkable and tempting hues, not for the legitimate purpose of covering their ankles, but of displaying them in such glory,-" began to suffer from great blisters; and, though the haberdashers issued fervent certificates guaranteeing their goods free from poisonous ingredients, certain colours were for a time unsaleable. Perkin soon remedied this.

Few men could have been more fortunate than the .great chemist from a business point of view. It was only in 1857 that he (with his brother) set up the aniline dyeworks, and sixteen years later, at the very early age of thirty-six, he was able to sell the, business and retire to private life. Private life for Sir William (as he became in 1906) meant a leisurely pursuit of chemical and physical research, with occasional Saturdays devoted to playing trios with his friends on the violin, flute, and piano. He died in 1907, leaving behind him a son of the same name who proved a worthy chip of the old chemical block.