Perkin’s mauve

Oxidation. Aromatic amines can undergo a variety of oxidation reactions, depending on the oxidizing agent and the reaction conditions. For example, oxidation of aniline can lead to formation of phenyUiydroxylamine, nitrosobenzene, nitrobenzene, azobenzene, azoxybenzene or -benzoquinone. Oxidation was of great importance in the early stages of the development of aniline and the manufacture of synthetic dyes, such as aniline black and Perkin s mauve. 

While Nicolas Leblanc and his washing soda helped start the bulk chemical industry, Perkin s mauve spawned the world s dye and pharmaceutical drug industries. His synthetic dye was the first in a cascade of colors that institutionalized scientific research, professionalized chemists, changed the economies of vast regions, and helped make turn-of-the-century Germany the world s leading industrial power. Perkin was an ado-... 

That spring, Perkin mailed a precious sample of his purple to a Scottish dye firm. After exposing the sample to sunlight, the company s owner, Robert Pullar, wrote back that Perkin s mauve had kept its color better than any other lilac on the market. If your discovery does not make the goods too expensive, it is decidedly one of the most valuable that has come out for a very long time. This colour is one which has been very much wanted in all classes of goods, and could not be obtained fast on silks, and only at great expense on cotton yarns. ... 

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, mauve mania was over and the elegant world whirled on to a new color. A magnificent red never seen before in dyes, the French hue was variously named fuchsia for the flower blossom and magenta for a northern Italian town where the Emperor Napoleon III had defeated Austria that summer. Like Perkin s mauve, magenta was a wildly popular synthetic dye with humble origins in coal tar, that is, in aniline and other similar compounds. 

Hofmann himself made a fabulously brilliant violet that replaced Perkin s mauve, even though the professor s dye was not as fast as his student s. Dyers thought no one would want fleeting tints, but, no matter, the experts were wrong. Women craved raucous and dramatic hues they... 

Perkin s Mauve Ancestor of the Organic Chemical Industry. Technology... 

Since prehistoric times man has been dyeing cloth. The wearing of the purple has long been synonymous with royalty, attesting to the cost and rarity of Tyrian purple, a dye derived from the sea snail Murex brandaris. The organic chemical industry originated with William Henry Perkin s discovery of the first synthetic dye, Perkin s Mauve, in 1856. 

The basic dyes are historically interesting because Perkin s mauve (see Chapter 1) belonged to this class, as do Magenta and Malachite Green which were amongst the earliest synthetic dyes. 

Heinrich Caro (Posen, 13 February i834-Dresden, ii September 1911) in 1859 was in the dye firm of Roberts, Dale and Co. in Manchester, making Perkin s mauv e. He then joined the Badisc e Anilin und Soda Fabrik at Ludwigshafen, becoming a director (1868-89), and discovering many important dyestuf6. Caro obtained... 

Perkin s mauve was only one of the more precocious of a number of flowers which burst into bloom on the same fine day and it did not prove to be the longest lived or the most brilliant. Perhaps Perkin s greatest invention was not mauve at all, but technical service. 

As we will see in the next chapter, Perkin s mauve drove three world powers-Britain, France, and Germany-to seek domination in the business of producing colors. Within five years of mauve s appearance, there were already 28 dye manufacturers, not only in the big three, but also in Austria and Switzerland-many of them destined to become the industrial giants that we know today by such familiar acronyms as AGFA and BASF [77],... 

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