and then more woad added, with more lime, bran, madder and indigo. If the vats were skilfully managed it should colour 220 pounds of wool every week; within six weeks, the dyer should have four hundred pounds of dark blue wool, two hundred of half-blue, and two of very light. But this was only attainable if the very best woad and indigo were used, and here there were problems: ‘There is probably no article more uncertain in its strength and quality than woad,’ Partridge concluded. He advised buying only the very strongest, as ‘any considerable variation in this particular will prove very disastrous to the operator, however skilful he may be in his profession, and will be altogether ruinous to a young beginner’.
As with cinchona bark, the supply of plant dyes was often limited to specific regions and hampered by a nation’s attempts to monopolise production. Clothes manufacturers were forced to use the colours available in the dyers’ vats; trends in colour were fashioned less by taste than by the vagaries of war and efficiencies of foreign ports. It stood to reason that a colour you could make on demand in a laboratory somewhere, with a constant strength and purity, would surely be worth an awful lot of money.
Initially, Perkin called his discovery Tyrian purple, the better to elevate its worth. His detractors, those who believed his discovery insignificant, preferred to call it purple sludge. Chief amongst these was August Hofmann, who learnt of Perkin’s new colour after the summer holidays, along with some distressing news of his protégé’s future. The two arranged a meeting, during which Perkin told Hofmann that he was considering manufacturing mauve commercially. He also said that this would require him to leave the Royal College of Chemistry. ‘At this he appeared much annoyed,’ Perkin recalled at a memorial meeting to mark Hofmann’s death in 1892. ‘[He] spoke in a very discouraging manner, making me feel that perhaps I might be taking a false step which might ruin my future prospects.’
The objection caused a serious rift between them – probably the first cross words they had exchanged. ‘Hofmann perhaps anticipated that the undertaking would be a failure, and was very sorry to think that I should be so foolish as to leave my scientific work for such an object, especially as I was then but a lad of eighteen years of age. I must confess that one of my great fears on entering into technical work was that it might prevent my continuing research . . .’*
Hofmann and his colleagues would have found it hard to imagine how one of the most promising scientific careers could be summarily abandoned in pursuit of a colour. Chemists came across new colours at random almost every week, and just as easily dismissed them as being an undesirable or irrelevant side-effect of their missions. Besides, some chemists had deliberately produced artificial dyes before mauve, and had observed how well they had coloured silk or wool, but had not attempted to manufacture them in commercial quantities. The first had been the picric acid made by Woulfe in 1771 from indigo and nitric acid (it dyed silk bright yellow), and in 1834 Runge had used carbolic acid to make aurin (a red colour), and pittacal (a deep blue) was obtained from beechwood tar. Other colours encouraged the development of implausible histories, not least murexide, which surfaced in small quantities in Manchester dye works in the 1850s and was said to come from the excrement of serpents (rather than its true source, bird-droppings). But the quantities of synthetic dyes in use at the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was so small as to not merit any mention in the huge accompanying Reports.
Then there was the bright crimson produced by Perkin and Church some months before, again considered unworthy of further exploitation. Perkin’s purple might have been cast aside in a similar manner were it not for the further encouragement he received from Robert Pullar in Perth towards the end of 1856.
The scale of Pullar’s dye works must have seemed an impressive place to a young man unfamiliar with industrial practices. The presence of scientists, however, was nothing new to print works, and some had employed their own textile chemists from 1815. In fact, Perkin’s discovery came at a time when the state of technical advance in Britain’s dye and printing works was ideally poised to exploit it. Production levels in the textile industry were increasing at unprecedented rates. Exports in the calico business, for example, increased fourfold between 1851 and 1857, from about 6,500,000 items to 27 million. Employment in the silk industry doubled to 150,000 people between 1846 and 1857. At one of the many jubilee celebrations of Perkin’s discovery, the chemist C. J. T. Cronshaw told a gathering of the Society of Chemical Industry: ‘If a fairy godmother had given Perkin the chance of choosing the precise moment for his discovery, he could not have selected a more appropriate or more auspicious time.’
This was not only true of the position of Britain’s dye works. Perkin could only have discovered mauve when he did because of the particular state of chemical knowledge. He was born not long after the Cumbrian chemist John Dalton had theorised that atoms combine with each other in definite numbers, thus leading to the establishment of chemical formulae. But Perkin conducted his early experiments at a time when so much was yet unknown, thus allowing for his productive error over the synthesis of quinine. If Perkin had been born twenty years later, he would have known how fruitless his search would have been, and thus would not have blundered into mauve. John Dalton, incidentally, died twelve years before Perkin’s discovery, but the beauty would have been lost on him anyway: in 1794 he had been the first person to describe colour blindness – his own.
The principal reason that August Hofmann would have failed to share Perkin’s enthusiasm for his new colour was because he would not have been unduly surprised by it. Even before he came to London he had heard Liebig predict that artificial dyes would someday be made from a substance such as aniline. But the roots of his disapproval lay in the current relationship between pure and applied science, which really meant the relationship between science and industry, two worlds set against each other by deficiencies in education.
In 1853, Lord Lyon Playfair had travelled through Germany and France at the request of the Prince Consort, specifically to report back on the state of foreign scientific and technical education. His analysis was damning: the great universities of Europe had already forged a strong connection between laboratory work and industry, whereas in industrial Britain he found only an ‘overweening respect for practice and contempt for science’. He found the greatest culprit to be the severe shortcomings in basic teaching. Playfair feared the impact on Britain in the event of free trade, suggesting that when ‘the raw materials confined to one country become readily available to all at a slight difference in cost, then the competition in industry must become a competition in intellect’.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 inspired many lectures sponsored by the Society of Arts, and some of them singled out a peculiar irony: while Britain shook the world with its industrial clout, it was virtually alone in Europe in lacking a well-defined system of technical education.
The same year saw the opening of Owens College in Manchester, and at its inaugural gala the college’s professor of chemistry Edward Frankland suggested that Britain’s textile industry was ill-prepared for the future. Its pre-eminence in manufacture would only be maintained by far stronger links with men of science. ‘The advantages of chemistry to the chemical manufacturer, the dyer and calico printer are almost too obvious to require comment,’ he said. ‘These processes cannot be carried out without some knowledge of our science, yet with the exception of some few firms . . . this knowledge is too often only superficial, sufficient to prevent egregious blunders and ruinous losses, but inadequate to seize upon and turn to advantage the numerous hints which are almost sure to be constantly furnished in all manufacturing processes.’
The Chemical Society, founded in 1841, drew its few hundred members from manufacturing and academic backgrounds, and prided itself on the links between the two. In 1853, the president of the society, Frank Daubeny, seemed to express relief when he informed his members that Professor Robert Bunsen’s work on volcanic eruptions could be used as ‘undeniable evidence of the extensive utility of our pursuits’. Four years later, the new president W. A. Miller spoke of the invention of mauve as further proof of the burgeoning usefulness of their skills. ‘One of our Fellows, Mr Perkin, has afforded me the opportunity of bringing before you
