Writing many years later in The Dyer, Laurence Morris listed six hindrances to Perkin’s future success, a daunting tally for an eighteen-year-old, (1) There was no reason to believe that capital could be found to launch the venture. (2) There was no guarantee that dyers and printers would use the colours at all, let alone in the quantities required to justify the building of a factory to manufacture it. (3) The raw materials required to make it were largely crude chemicals in limited supply. (4) No site was available to build a factory. (5) Methods of applying the new colour to most textiles had yet to be worked out. And (6) Perkin did not have any experience of what he was about to do. In all ways, Perkin appeared to be quite out of his depth. Making a colour was one thing; bringing it to the world quite another.
To reassure each other, Perkin and Robert Pullar spent a little over two weeks conducting experiments and touring Scottish dye works. The results were disappointing. Mauve would not dye cotton without a mordant (an intermediate fixative that allowed the colour to ‘bite’ into the material). Unlike the existing vegetable dyes, mauve was not acidic, and all the existing mordants Pullar possessed failed to work on a synthetic dye; on cotton, mauve faded dramatically after each wash. The conservative printers and dye technicians they met in Glasgow were consistently brusque and dismissive. ‘Ach, ye’re wrang this time, Mr Robert,’ one printer remarked on their travels. ‘D’ye think anything will take the place o’ madder?’
‘It was a very discouraging day,’ Perkin noted as his pessimism deepened. ‘Although the colours were admired, that terrible IF respecting the cost was always brought forward.’ He estimated that he would be unable to supply purified solid mauve for less than £3 per ounce – this at a time when an ounce of platinum cost just over £1. His problem was that to make one ounce of mauve he required about 400 pounds of coal.
To his advantage, mauve appeared to be the most intense colour the dyers and printers of Scotland had seen. In one experiment, Perkin demonstrated that one part of mauve dyed 630,000 parts of water. ‘Yet the printers who tried it did not show any great enthusiasm,’ Perkin concluded, fearing that he was beginning to lose the support of his host. ‘Even Messrs Pullar began to fluctuate in their opinion as to the advisability of erecting plant for its manufacture.’
Perkin returned to London to receive a curious note from August Hofmann. Resigned to losing him as a student, Hofmann realised that he might now be useful as a supplier of materials for his own researches. ‘My dear Mr Perkin,’ he began. ‘Since you manufacture aniline now on rather a large scale, would you be so good as to let me have a quart or two of it. Of course I am most anxious to pay for it. I am very prepared for it and would thank you much for a speedy reply to this note.’ It is not known how Perkin responded. But despite Hofmann’s assumption, Perkin was having trouble securing enough aniline for his own samples.
Shortly after Christmas, Perkin received another letter, this time with positive news. Robert Pullar had found one dyer who might be supportive. ‘As I was unable to help [the application of mauve] forward myself,’ Pullar later recalled, ‘I introduced Sir William to a friend, Mr Keith, in Bethnal Green, the largest silk dyer in London at that time.’
Thomas Keith, who had made a big splash with a beautiful display of silks at the Great Exhibition of 1851, offered Perkin the two things the Scottish dyers had not: faith and daring. ‘He believed in it from the first,’ Pullar said. After Keith had tried some of his own experiments with mauve, Pullar observed that these new shades ‘are certainly the best I ever saw’. Shortly afterwards, both Pullar and Perkin independently found a tannin mordant with which to apply mauve to cotton and fasten it against water and light. Pullar wrote again to Perkin in triumphant tones: ‘I suppose you are now fully decided to go on with it, from what I have seen there appears to be no doubt of its success.’ But the optimism was premature.
‘Time would fail me to enter into all the difficulties that beset the establishment of this unique industry,’ Perkin wrote some years after the event. ‘In fact, it was all pioneering work.’ The first problem was financial: no one seemed willing to support his venture. Though Perkin had no experience of the banking market, his older friends were also unable to secure capital for what investors regarded as a harebrained and ‘unnecessary’ scheme. But after several months of rejection, Perkin’s father decided to take on the venture himself. ‘Although he had been disappointed at my becoming a chemist,’ his son remembered, ‘[he] nevertheless had so much confidence in my judgement that he very nobly risked most of the capital he had accumulated by a life of great industry in order to build and start works for the production …’ Perkin’s older brother Thomas Dix Perkin also abandoned his architecture course in order to help establish the dye works, and together the three of them – now registered as Perkin & Sons – searched for a suitable site. Here too there were problems, and their original plans for land in the East End were thwarted by their ambition. They were seeking a large open area with good water supplies and transport connections, and potential for steady expansion. They faced objections from local planning authorities suspicious of the hazards of new chemical works; the newspapers were full of stories of noxious gases and poisoned streams. They had about £6,000 to spend, and found themselves pushed northwards, further and further from their home.
Their frustration was noted in a letter to William Perkin from John Pullar, Robert’s brother, in May 1857. John Pullar was also in the dyeing business, working at Bridge of Allan, one of the factories Perkin visited on his trip to Scotland. ‘I observe you have not yet begun to set the Thames on fire,’ Pullar wrote. There was a certain poignancy in this phrase, as Pullars Dye Works had recently been badly damaged by a blaze. (‘Had the wind been high,’ Pullar noted, ‘probably our whole works and machinery erected at such a cost of trouble and expense would have been destroyed.’) Pullar was sorry to learn that Perkin had as yet been baffled in his attempts to secure a piece of ground for his works. ‘I sincerely hope you may e’er long meet with a suitable place, and on reasonable terms – but I fear you will have to seek for it as you indicate near Manchester or Glasgow, or some such place where a chemical works is not such a bugbear as it appears to be to the benighted inhabitants in the vicinity of the Metropolis.’
Writing previously to Pullar, Perkin had told him that Thomas Keith had asked female friends what they thought about mauve, and their reaction had been effusive. Pullar perhaps misunderstood the size of the sample. ‘I am glad to hear that a rage for your colour has set in among that all-powerful class of the community – the ladies. If they once take a mania for it and you can supply the demand, your fame and fortune are secure.’
Only a week after this letter arrived, Perkin & Sons at last secured a suitable site, but it was in an area unfamiliar to them – Greenford Green near Harrow, north-west of London in the country of Middlesex. The site was a meadow close to the Grand Junction Canal. At a little over six acres, it offered plenty of room for development. But it was a modest location from which to plan a revolution in colour.
The Perkins had found the spot through an advertisement placed by a woman called Hannah Harris, who had inherited the land from her husband Ambrose, the owner of the Black Horse public house at the edge of the site. Mrs Harris had only one condition about the sale of the land: no other pub should be built on it.
William Perkin’s father began construction at the end of June 1857, a project that would last six months. The Perkins calculated that the production of mauve would require seven small and low buildings, three for direct manufacture and the others to house materials, an office, staff and a laboratory. During construction, the Perkins moved from Shadwell to a temporary home a short walk from the site, where William set up his chemical equipment in the small back wash-house and conducted new experiments on the artificial synthesis of various acids. He described these domestic labours as ‘very difficult and painful’, and poor ventilation meant he frequently abandoned his work when overcome with vapours.
/>
The meadow often became waterlogged when the nearby brook burst its banks, but otherwise water served them well; there was a plentiful supply for manufacture, and the nearby canal carried barges that would, it was hoped, soon carry cakes of mauve dye to the fashionable printers in London and then to the continent.
During the months of construction, William Perkin travelled the country in search of suitable materials. As no one had worked with aniline on a large scale before, he reasoned he would have to make it himself. Originally he had hoped that he would be able to obtain sufficient quantities by the method which led to his original discovery, but concluded that this would make it too expensive (such a tiny amount was produced from so many tons) and was anyway too complex a procedure to conduct on a grand scale. He concluded he would make aniline from coal-tar-dreived nitrobenzene, although this too was problematic.
‘Benzene at this time was only made to a very limited extent, as there was but little use for it,’ he noted. After some searching, he ordered his main supplies from a chemical works in Glasgow at five shillings a gallon. ‘In commencing this manufacture, it was absolutely necessary to proceed tentatively,’ he observed, ‘as most of the operations required new kinds of apparatus.’ Thus he and his brother were obliged to design their own machinery, and the early models were primitive and highly combustible. One of Perkin’s illustrations shows a cast-iron cylinder holding up to 40 gallons with a stirring tool at one end and a lid fastened by a crossbar at the other. There were two funnels built into the top, one to let in benzene and sulphuric acid, the other to emit nitrous fumes. Significantly, the design of Perkin’s equipment remained a prominent feature in Europe’s dye works for eighty years. ‘The nitration of benzene is not, of course, a process free from all danger,’ Laurence Morris noted subsequently, ‘and in those early, groping stages of manufacture it is a miracle that Perkin did not blow himself and Greenford Green to pieces.’
In less than six months after the building of the works had commenced, aniline purple was dyeing silk in Thomas Keith’s dye house.
*
In 1858, Perkin combined a trip to Leeds with a visit to the annual meeting of the British Association. During his opening address, Richard Owen, the president, sensed a big change in the world of the chemist. Modern chemistry was on the cusp of unfathomable advances. ‘To the power which mankind may ultimately exercise through the light of synthesis, who may presume to set limits?’ he asked. ‘Already, natural processes can be more economically replaced by artificial ones in the formation of a few organic compounds … It is impossible to foresee the extent to which chemistry may ultimately, in the production of things needful, supersede the present vital energies of nature.’
A few hours later, William Perkin gave a speech entitled ‘On the Purple Dye Obtained from Coal Tar’, a lecture he illustrated with samples of his work. He held up a sheet of silk, and then a skein of wool, and ran through the process of how they came to be. The assembled scientists declared themselves entranced by the manufacture and enamoured of the product.
One year later, Perkin was addressing the Society of the Arts on New Year’s Day. He said of mauve: ‘I will now tell you how it is made.’ The process was clearly complex, and may have seemed so even when broken down into simple terms for his distinguished audience. The procedure took two days, Perkin said. The process combined aniline, sulphuric acid and bichromate of potassium, resulting in a fine black solution that was filtered to a soot-black powder. This contained various products apart from mauve, the most troublesome being a brown resinous substance that had to be removed with naphtha and methylated spirits. Perkin again had to design special apparatus for this process, and he had particular problems with the sealants and joints: ‘It is remarkable the amount of difficulty and annoyance they caused.’
The substance he finally produced was placed in a still, where the spirit was distilled off. The remaining fluid was then filtered, washed with caustic soda and water and drained on another filter, leaving a very dark mauve paste. Perkin then presented his audience with a list of substances on a chalk board, an illustration of how much coal was required to produce so little mauve. The list began with 100 pounds of coal, from which was derived 10 pounds 10 ounces of coal-tar, 8½ ounces of coal-tar naphtha, 2¼ ounces of aniline, and only ¼ ounce of mauve.
Perkin claimed that one pound of his mauve could dye 200 pounds of cotton. He then produced a large bottle known as a carboy. He said there were nine gallons of water in it. He dropped in one grain of mauve, and illuminated the spectacular result with a magnesium lamp: the whole container turned mauve within four seconds. It was understood, for measuring purposes, that one gallon of water contained 70,000 grains, and that his bottle contained 630,000 grains. ‘This solution,’ he concluded, ‘contains only one part of mauve to 630,000 of water!’ He sat down to huge applause.
Perkin was used to this reaction, for he had conducted this demonstration numerous times on his travels. What Perkin did not tell them was the initial disdain that had greeted these samples when he had shown them to printers. ‘The calico printers especially were not at all excited about it,’ he wrote later. Their response sent him into a ‘mild despair’, and he was shaken by the printers’ power to so quickly dismiss a new opportunity; he noted that their reaction was little changed from that of the Scottish dyers he had visited two years earlier, before he had abandoned the Royal College, before his father had sunk his savings into his factory.
At the same time, he faced another piece of bad news. He learnt that he had failed to secure the French patent for mauve because he had not registered within six months of his British patent. He soon found that at least one established dye works in Lyons had apparently copied his process and was producing a very recognisable colour.
For a few weeks at the beginning of 1858, the Perkin family experienced deep gloom. William Perkin must have wondered whether August Hofmann had been right all along: was he indeed throwing away the prospect of a brilliant career? Despite these doubts, he maintained eighteen-hour days, developing the factory, limiting explosions, improving his methods, trying to interest British printers in a simple invention. And then two things happened to change his life. Queen Victoria wore mauve to her daughter’s wedding; and Empress Eugénie, the single most influential woman in the world of fashion, decided that mauve was a colour that matched her eyes.
6
MAUVE MEASLES
Knights of old broke each other’s ribs, and let out each other’s blood, dying happily among a heap of shivered armour, so that their ladies’ colours still waved from their helmet, or sopped up the blood oozing from their gaping heart wounds; but you, Mr Perkins [sic], luckier than they, rib unbroken, skull uncracked, can itinerate Regent Street and perambulate the Parks, seeing the colours of thy heart waving on every fair head and fluttering round every cheek!
All the Year Round, September 1859
A particular fad for a colour began taking hold of Paris in the second half of 1857, and reached London the following year. The colour was mauve, the French name for the common mallow plant. As with most things fashionable, the Empress Eugénie appeared to lead the way. Emperor Napoleon III, easily intoxicated by pomp and display, married the 26-year-old Eugénie Montijo in 1853, and together they did their best to sweep away the dowdy parsimony of the Second Empire and restore the trappings of the grand court. The Emperor was a great leader by example, and he encouraged the Empress to promote trade by wearing heavy Lyons silks and all the luxe garments of Paris.
She needed little encouragement. Her own extravagant fashion sense, and her limitless budget, made her the target of every designer and court bulletin. This coincided with the publication of several new women’s magazines devoted to cooking and clothes, and Eugénie’s every stitch was recorded with zeal. In Britain, the establishment of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1852 by Samuel Beeton included hand-coloured fashion engravings, and ensured that trends from Europe would soon be knowledge in Lond
on, Norwich and Edinburgh (Beeton’s wife Isabella published her book of Household Management in 1859 as an offshoot from the magazine).
Eugénie’s particular fondness for mauve was first noted by the Illustrated London News towards the end of 1857, and it is possible that her preference influenced the choice of Queen Victoria’s gowns for the marriage of her daughter the Princess Royal to Prince Frederick William in January 1858. Napoleon and Eugénie had visited the Queen and Prince Albert in London in 1854, during which the Queen had organised an appointment for Eugénie with her designer Charles Creed. But by the time Victoria and Albert paid a return visit to the Emperor and Empress on the occasion of the Paris Exhibition, Victoria’s clothes were judged out of date, and it may have been that she now turned to Eugénie for some guidance.
For the royal marriage, the Illustrated London News reported that ‘the train and body of her Majesty’s dress was composed of rich mauve (lilac) velvet, trimmed with three rows of lace; the corsage ornamented with diamonds and the celebrated Koh-i-noor brooch; the petticoat, mauve and silver moiré antique, trimmed with a deep flounce of Honiton lace; the head-dress, a Royal diadem of diamonds and pearls.’
Three months later, the magazine noted that ‘the mauve colour at present so highly fashionable is honoured by the especial favour of her Majesty … at the last levee her Majesty’s train was of mauve velvet. The mauve is an exquisite shade of lilac. The mauve colour is also tastefully blended with black or grey.’
Mauve Page 6
