Mauve decade

The color was so distinctive that Perkin wondered if the product could be used as a dye. In 1856, he sent samples of the chemical to a dyeing company, Pullars of Perth, who responded that the dye appeared to have commercial potential. Perkin immediately applied for a patent on the dye, which rapidly became very popular in Great Britain and especially in France. It was the French, in fact, who gave the dye the name by which it is now known, mauve (the French word for the plant from which the natural and similarly colored dye alizarin is produced). As a consequence of the dye s huge commercial success, the decade of the 1890s is now referred to as the Mauve Decade. 

These discoveries were important not only because of the individual new compounds, hut also because they totally changed the nature of the dyestuff industry. Since the dawn of civilization, humans had relied on natural products (plants and animals) as dyes to color clothing and other fabrics. With the dawn of the Mauve Decade, such dyes very quickly became abundantly available at rather modest costs. 

The Mauve Decade also saw the rise of another branch of organic chemistry that was to have enormous impact on the development of new materials the field of polymer chemistry. Polymer chemistry is the science that deals with very large molecules consisting of hundreds or thousands of repeating units called monomers. Possibly the single most familiar class of polymer in use today is the group called plastics. 

Perkin suspected he had a dye. He left school and used family money to start a factory. Within six months, he was producing what he called Aniline Purple. French dyers clamored for the new dye and named the color mauve. So popular did the color become that this period of history is known as the Mauve Decade. Perkin, having founded the huge synthetic dye industry, could retire, wealthy, at thirty-five. 

Perkin s discovery was important not simply because he found a new and very useful dye. In the first place, Perkin (in collaboration with his father) opened a chemical factory to manufacture mauve on a large scale. The business was so successful that the younger Perkin was able to retire from the business in 1874, at the age of 35, to devote himself full time to chemical research on topics of interest to him. Second, Perkin s success inspired many other chemists in Great Britain and on the Continent to look for other potentially lucrative synthetic dyes. Over the next decade, a host of such dyes... 

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