(As per usual, if you have a burning question, you can ask
here!)
A science fact everyone should know and/or that is cool. Oh, gosh — the difficulty with being someone with expertise in chemistry is that I never know what people do/don't know, because stuff that I take for granted might be something that everyone does, or it might be something that makes everyone sit up and go, "what the
fuck are you talking about?"
Suppose I can be a little self-indulgent, since it's my journal, and say —
The history of synthetic dyes is really interesting stuff. We'll settle on that, because it's weird and fun.
We're (probably) all familiar with the whole thing about how purple is the color of royalty because for centuries, purple/violet dyes were incredibly difficult to come by — think
Tyrian purple, which was labor-intensive and required thousands of snails to create.
As alchemy became chemistry, with chemists moving more toward natural science and away from transmutation, part of the shift in approach was a desire to understand what gives rise to different natural products. How do we make them, what's their structure, etc. Not dyes so much as medicines and other valuable products that can be found in nature but that it might be nicer to be able to synthesize.
Starting in the early 1800s, we're getting a better grip on the periodic table, etc (though it isn't a table,
yet) — we've been able to isolate some of the elements, we're beginning to have better understanding of different reactions, especially organic reactions, and what leads to the products that are desired. There's an interest in understanding how plants like indigo are able to work as dyes — can we isolate what molecule it is that gives rise to those dye colors. A lot of work is done to identify that molecule — one that gets called
aniline — though the interest in it is less in using it as a dye (since it's not useful as one) and more in using it as a precursor for other chemicals (
like eventually, polyurethane).
So.
Fast-forward to 1856. William Henry Perkin is a student at the Royal College of Chemistry. His PI, a guy named
August Wilhelm von Hofmann, was an important organic chemist (he coined the term "synthesis" and if you have ever taken organic chemistry you are certainly familiar with his work) who had done a great deal of work on aniline and was hellbent on synthesizing quinine. He had a scheme that he thought would work to create it, and like all great PIs, he shoved it off on one of his students — in this case, Perkin. "Go do this and see if it works" — nice to know that some things never actually change, ha.
The synthetic scheme itself was unsuccessful — instead of making quinine, Perkin made what we would charitably call "black goop". Trying to clean it out of the flask he'd done the reaction in with alcohol, he was surprised to realize that the liquid was
bright purple. Some initial tests showed that it could dye fabric, and so Perkin dropped out of college to patent it, selling it as "
mauveine", and kicking off the synthetic dye frenzy. Mauveine was cheap and easy to make — after all, we'd figured out how to make aniline industrially — and so here was a color that had previously been unattainable, suddenly
everywhere. People went a bit nuts for it, you had everyone running around wearing mauve, to the extent that different satirical publications wrote about the "mauve measles", and chemists everywhere sat up and went, "
If that asshole can do it, I bet I can, too" — the real basis of scientific discovery. (TRULY.)
The craze for mauveine would eventually die down, as other aniline dyes (as they were called) were discovered, and other colors became available, but mauveine was the first. Despite its drawbacks (it's carcinogenic and prone to fading), it was the first commercially significant synthetic dye, and it really did kick off a huge line of work in organic chemistry.
It's sort of funny, actually, but the first line of synthetic dyes would also lead (indirectly) to the discovery of
sulfa antibiotics. :)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maju![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
