FAMOUS CHEMIST

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4054, 30 May 1938, Page 7

FAMOUS CHEMIST

CENTURY SINCE BIRTH. ANILINE DYE INDUSTRY Everyone with an eye for colour should be grateful for the birth, 100 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 18 when he discovered his first mineral dye—a mauve—formed by the oxidation of aniline. A little later he elaborated two processes of manufacturing artificial alizarin (hitherto extracted from madder) from coal tar, thus setting the miner-al-dye business on a commercial footing.

Although, of course, Perkin soon began to make other colours besides mauve, it was the 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 the people talked to him of nothing else but mauve, exclaimed: ‘Why, even the copper at the corner 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 Perkin’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.