“It’s 1856 Britain, and an 18 year old chemistry student is messing around in the laboratory trying to make quinine out of coal tar to save some lives and expand the glorious empire etc, but as early chemistry is a bit ham-fisted, instead he manages to make a seemingly useless bright purple solution. For funzies he dips some silk in the solution, and is rather impressed with the result. Hand-wave over some really boring history of mordants and patent laws, and he manages to get a dye firm interested in his creation, and the world’s first commercially available artificial dye is soon available, and much more cheaply than any natural dye on the market. Not only is it the first artificial dye, but it is the first use of anything produced through chemical research in an exclusively commercial application. So the birth of the modern chemical industry started with a garish purple dye. The dye also was useful to biological science because it could be used to stain things for examination under microscopes.”
- a quick argument for why the invention of mauveine, aka purple dye, is one of the most influential and important inventions in modern history
- a quick argument for why the invention of mauveine, aka purple dye, is one of the most influential and important inventions in modern history
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