Mauveine

An Easter vacation in an east London attic

During the Royal College of Chemistry's Easter vacation in 1856, the 18-year-old William Henry Perkin worked in his home laboratory in east London on August Wilhelm von Hofmann's proposed route to synthetic quinine.

An allyltoluidine experiment failed. Perkin repeated the oxidation with aniline, and washing the dark product with alcohol gave a purple solution that readily dyed silk and survived washing.

The work happened in the family home, not in Hofmann's college laboratory.

From flask to patent inside a year

Perkin, his brother Thomas and his friend Arthur Church ran further trials and sent samples to Robert Pullar of the Pullars dyeworks in Perth for practical evaluation.

Perkin then secured British Patent No. 1984, "Dyeing Fabrics," dated 26 August 1856, covering a new lilac or purple colouring matter for textiles. Calling the outcome accidental describes the unexpected product rather than the dye: recognising it, testing it, scaling it and patenting it was deliberate work.

It was not called mauveine at the time

"Mauveine" is the modern chemical name. Perkin's product was first described and marketed as aniline purple or Tyrian purple, and "mauve" came into common use later.

The date is softer than it looks. The year and the Easter-vacation setting are well attested, but the sources consulted here do not establish a precise discovery day, so modern claims for 23 March should not be treated as certain.

The safest priority claim is the first commercialised synthetic dyestuff, rather than an unqualified claim over every earlier artificial colorant.