Finding no success, he added potassium dichromate, creating a dark
watery precipitate. While cleaning out his flask with ethylene alcohol, the
precipitate turned a dark purple, which he initially named “Tyrian Purple,”
later changing the name to “mauve.”^11
Purple has been the color of royalty for millennia, and in Roman times,
twelve thousand mollusks were required to produce enough Tyrian
(Phoenician) Purple to dye a single dress the size of a Roman toga. Other
plant-based dyes had been tried but always faded. Perkin immediately
realized the value of his discovery, performing experiments on the
“fastness” of the dye. Perkin had discovered a durable, inexpensive, yet
highly desirable material from rubbish, and quickly applied for a patent.
By the time he was nineteen, he opened a dyeworks outside London,
massively profiting from his serendipitous finding. Alchemy, apparently,
was possible after all.
The real mother lode in Perkin’s discovery was not in coloring clothing,
but something much, much bigger. Chemistry evolved into an industrial
discipline, with chemists scrambling to create other colors from coal tar in
hopes of cashing in like Perkin. In a surprising twist, the chemical
experimentation led not to new dyes but to new molecules that had
biological effects. One of the early products created with the new learning
was N-acetyl-p-aminophenol, today known as Tylenol. From the nascent
synthetic dyes industry exploded new knowledge about chemical
reactions, with enormous advances in medicine, photography, perfumery,
food, and explosives.
The improved understanding of chemical structures led to massive
growth of European companies with chemical expertise, particularly in
Germany, where companies such as BASF, Bayer, Agfa, and Hoechst were
founded. The modern pharmaceutical companies were born in short order,
starting in the 1880s; some of them (like Merck) had existed for years as
apothecary shops, peddling plant extracts, but the new understanding of
synthetic chemistry transformed the companies into major industrial
chemical research entities. Previous small concern companies like
Schering, Burroughs Wellcome, Abbott, Smith Kline, Parke-Davis, Eli
Lilly, Squibb, and Upjohn all metamorphosed into giant companies
rushing to create new medicines.^12
The quiescent field of microscopy, where little progress had been
achieved in over two hundred years, was poised for an awakening.