John Jay talks about The Color Purple:
Today’s installment of Scientists You Should Know is brought to you by the color purple. Mauve, in fact. This past April marked 150 years since mankind stopped relying on plants and bugs to supply the colors of its world, and mauve was the first of those artificial colors. Before you snicker, consider that mauve was once such a novelty that an entire decade was named for it.* Before the discovery of purple dyes derived from coal tar, literally thousands of shellfish had to be slaughtered to obtain a few grams of purple — making it so expensive that it became a royal color in ancient times.Until the advent of the artificial aniline colorants, most dyes were of plant (such as madder), insect (such as cochineal) or (I shit you not) bird fecal origin. Imagine the work it took to collect enough poop, bugs or plants to dye a garment, and you can see why a coal tar-derived synthetic dye was a huge leap forward — at least for the clothing manufacturers, if not for the insect-gatherers. We’ll leave the birds right out of it, because I’m quite sure even the people who made their living from that extraction were happy to learn a new skill or two.
The dominion of plant and animal dyes came to an end over the Easter academic break in 1856, when an 18 year old student of the Royal College of Chemistry, working in his home laboratory, was trying to make quinine from coal tar, which was a common, oily by-product of the process of making coke and town gas from coal. The project had been suggested to William Perkin by his mentor, the German organic chemist August Hofmann.
As Jay reiterates in Educated Beyond our Intelligence, Perkin was just 15 when he went to college and 18 when he made one of the most important chemical discoveries in history — which would be hard to do in a modern school environment:
We treat adolescents and young 20-somethings like pets in this society. We don’t expect much from them, and with some rare exceptions, we don’t get a lot from them.