Sir William Henry Perkin

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we have a little bit of housekeeping to do before we get into today's episode. If you are a listener, you may be wondering what happened to that trip to Italy. We were planning that trip to Italy that we've been planning since late for two years now. So, uh, it was originally planned for a certain date, back up, pushed back for a pandemic. We've pushed it a few times. It is currently back on for May of two. Yes, it had been originally planned to happen maybe essentially as when this episode is coming out, but it seems much safer for everyone to try to postpone it again for hopeful fingers crossed last time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And if you are interested in that trip, I can promise you we had an absolute blast on our last trip and we went to France, and I expect nothing but the same on this one. We are going to do some very fun stuff and if you're interested, you can go to Defined Destinations dot com, slash Rome Dash Florence. That will give you the whole scoop on all this planned. Uh, And I know there's been some shifting. A lot of people have stuck with it. So if you're one of our listeners that registered way way back in the beginning, in the before times, and you've stuck it out and you're still planning to come with us, fantastic. If you are someone who wasn't in on that and now you think you want to, there are still some spaces left, uh, so please take a peek at that. And if it looks delicious and fun for you, and I think it's going to be both of those things, we'd love to have you with us. Yeah, all right, and now, uh we are getting into today's topic. So this involves colors, which is one of my favorite things to talk about. So we mentioned the creation of Synthetic Die on the podcast before, most specifically on episode on the history of Colors. But the chemist who stumbled onto mauve Die, which you will sometimes here pronounced mov as well, just how I set it growing up, and now I've transitioned to move. But if I say a mom, that's just because it's ingrained from forty plus years before I decided to change it up. Uh. That man is often latted as having changed the world, which is a pretty significant thing to say about a person. And William Henry Perkin is unique in that he saw how quickly the world of industry changed in response to his innovation. So today we're going to talk about his life and how, yes, creating move was the beginning, and that's something he did while still quite young. But it wasn't as though he made this discovery and then just let that be the thing that defined him. He then hustled and turned that discovery into a business and continued to innovate and he ushered in a new field of commercially oriented chemistry. William Henry Perkin was born on March twelfth, thirty eight, at three King David Lane in Shadowell, London. His father was George Fowler Perkin, who was a carpenter and a builder, And that might sound like a really humble start, but the builder there is more like a general contractor, and George Perkin was really successful. His seven children, of which William Henry was the last, had a private school and easy walking distance of the family home. That was the Arbor Terrorists School, which William Henry attended, and William was a very smart kid. Uh. Pretty much every biography of him just mentions how curious and intellectual he was for a child, and he was interested in all kinds of things, from music to art to science. And when he was fourteen, he took a self portrait. Photograph has become a really common image that pops up when you look at Perkin's name, and that's notable considering that the dagara type had only been introduced thirteen years earlier, when he was still a baby, and by the time Perkin took his own photo, he had been dabbling in photography for about two years, So that speaks both to his ingenuity in new technology as well as the family's wealth in being able to afford the supplies needed for a budding fourteen year old photographer to kind of muck around and play with things. Early in his life, William was steered towards architecture as a career. His father encouraged him in that direction, and that actually seems like it could have been a pretty good match for his intellect and temperament because it would have combined his interest and curiosity and things like engineering and mechanics with a natural ability and art. William is said to have drawn and painted very well, and even started copying over architectural plans while he was a boy, so he seemed amenable to the idea of a career as an architect. But the moment that got him passionately interested in chemistry took place when he was still twelve years old. He saw a friend doing some very basic experiments with crystals, and he would later write about how much this got him thinking about chemistry and its possibility, saying quote the possibility also of making new discoveries impressed me very much. I determined if possible, to accumulate bottles of chemicals and make experiments. Shortly after this revelation, William started attending the City of London School. He took chemistry classes as not an elective because that wasn't even an option, but as sort of an ala carte add on to his class schedule for an extra seven shillings each term. Perkin was enrolled in lunchtime classes twice a week, so he needed to skip his lunch to go to class, and he was willing to do it because not only did Perkin perform chemistry experiments also when he was at home under advisement of his chemistry teacher, Thomas Hall, but he also attended additional chemistry lectures around London him he clearly was into this. He went to London Hospital to hear Henry Leatherby speak on the subject, and then he was also able to get permission from Michael Faraday to sit in on his electricity lectures at the Royal Institution. Perkin enrolled at the Royal College of Chemistry in eighteen fifty three at the age of fifteen. He had needed to convince his father that this was a good plan. He had gotten his chemistry teacher to help him in that effort. One of the reasons that George Perkin was initially pretty wary of the idea was that chemistry as a career was not really established. There just weren't many jobs to be had. But between William and his teacher, Thomas Hall, they made the case that this field had potential, and George Perkin finally acquiesced and at the Royal College of Chemistry. Perkin studied under August Wilhelm von Hoffman, and William quickly showed a very high degree of aptitude as well as dedication to the field of chemistry, and Hoffman made Perkin an honorary assistant. He's aims to have been just about obsessed with this field. As he mentioned, he was doing so much extra work in chemistry, and at this point he converted his room at home into a rudimentary lab. He recalled this setup later in life, writing quote, my private laboratory occupied half a long room and a few shelves for little bottles, and a table in my fireplace. I had even constructed an oven. I worked with an old brazilious alcohol lamp, and I did the burnings with charcoal in a shed. And in this laboratory I worked nights and during vacations. Perkin wrote his first published work on the production of menap philamine through combining cyanogen chloride with napthaline in eighteen fifty six. He was also promoted to a staff position in the lab that year, and then when he was eighteen, Perkins started his famous projects which he intended to synthesize quinine, and this was a vacation project. The school was closed for Easter break, so his teacher and mentor Hoffmann had suggested years earlier, back in eighteen forty nine that naphthaline could be used to prepare synthetic quinine, and quinine, of course, is in high demand for its curative powers, specifically for treating malaria, so finding a way to synthesize it in a lab instead of having to extract it from a bark was a rather thrilling prospect. And again Perkin was a striver, and coal tar, which was rich in amino compounds and was considered a pollutant, was also considered a potential solution to this problem. But the quinine alluded Perkin. His first attempt resulted in a reddish brown material that was not at all what he was after, and his second attempt he combined analyne sulfate with potassium dichromate, and this resulted in a black precipitate, still not quinine. And then there are two versions of this story, and one version he was washing his lab equipment after this failure, and note the black goo he had created left a purple residue and that it stained a cloth. And in the other he decided to try to salvage something out of this unsuccessful result and tried an extraction of the black precipitate with methanol. What he got was a move matter whichever of those versions played out, and it's possible that it could be kind of some overlap between them. He ended up with a purple substance that got the name moving. Okay, that's not a particularly common word, so in planer terms, he had accidentally discovered how to synthesize purple dye using an abundant source material that was considered garbage. So the name mouve is derived from the old French word for mallow because of that plant's pale purple flowers, so that's why it's called moving. There's a lot of writing about how much credit has to be given to Perkin regarding his insight here, and that's because it would have been easy to see that his result was not quinine as he had hoped, and then to write up the experiment and discard the seemingly incorrect result. But Perkins saw that he had possibly come up with something interesting, even if it had missed his intended target. So he next replicated the process, and then he started refining it to always get the move material on purpose. His older brother, Thomas Dix Perkin, assisted him in these experiments, and then he got the idea to test it as a die and to see if it had potential as a commercial product. So he first did a series of experiments dyeing silk samples with his movin, and then he sent those samples to the J. Polar and Son die house to get their opinion. And the letter he got back from Robert Polar read quote, if you're 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 color 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. I enclose you a pattern of the best lilac we have on cotton. It is died by only one house in the United Kingdom. But even this is not quite fast, and does not stand the tests that yours does, and fades by exposure to air. So this letter had to be a rather thrilling read for a young man who had been drawn to chemistry as a preteen because of the potential of discovering new things. And this person is basically like, yes, you did, and we really wanted. A close friend of his, Arthur H. Church, who was also an assistant at the lab at the Royal College of Chemistry, suggested that Perkin get a patent on his die as quickly as possible. There was a little bit of a hiccup here, because normally the Patent office would only grant patents to inventors who were twenty one or older. William was younger than that. But William and his brother prepared a sample and then on the advice of legal counsel, he applied for a patent anyway, that was granted on August eight. So coming up, we're going to talk about how Perkin turned this discovery into an industry, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Once Perkin had refined his method for creating moving and he had run it by those dyers, his next move was to set up a plant to make it. This was the start of an incredibly lucrative career in chemical manufacture, but it was at the time not a sure thing at all. Even though his purple, which he called a few different things, including moving analgine purple and tyrian purple, had received enthusiastic support from the die mill. This was not an industry that really existed at the time. Other diyes were still sourced from nature, not created synthetically, and he and be certain that die mills would be willing to use his product, or that they would be happy with the result. Keep in mind, Perkin was still a teenager at this point. He was really smart, sure, but he had absolutely no experience in the textile industry or in manufacturing. He had been able to conduct some experimental die runs at J. Puller and Son, and based on those he'd been able to refine his formulas to meet the needs of specific dyeing scenarios as potential problems had been identified. So it worked a different way on silk than it did on cotton, and he kind of worked with them to figure out the best ways to get the optimal result. But even though all of this work had already been done, the risk in setting up a plant was still very significant. On top of all of that, there was the matter of perkins job and his mentor august Bill Ham von Hoffman. When Perkin approached him to discuss his plan to become a full time chemical manufacturer, it did not go spectacularly well. Even though Perkin had sample to show how well his die actually worked. But regardless of whether his professor was impressed with the work itself, he was chagrined that Perkin would step away from academic life to drop down to what the academic community saw as a demeaning manufacturing job, even if he did own the place. It's a little snooty um. All of this gave Perkins confidence a little bit of a wobble, So he consulted another die expert in London and gave him some of the die to test, and that dire named Thomas Keith, responded very positively to the results and he urged Perkin to absolutely move forward with his business. But even so, securing capital for it again for a young, unproven man and a young unproven industry, was a hurdle that was proving hard to overcome. Another boost to any wavering on perkins part came from his father. While George Perkin may have initially doubted the lucrative possibilities of a career in chemistry, by the time Williams Moving die had been refined, he was really a believer. He offered to finance the startup of a die plant. To be clear, George Perkin was wealthy, but he was still taking a huge risk here. He put most of his assets on the line for his son, so if this business failed, he would be cleaned out financially. That's gotta be um, both a huge sense of trust and like feeling very loved and believed in by your parents, and also stressful. Um, I'm so glad you believe in me. Please don't let me ruin you. Uh. There was an additional and immense element of support that came from William's brother, Thomas Dicks Perkin. We mentioned that he had already helped will with his his experiments, and Thomas had a head for business and he had learned about construction from their father, and so he became William's partner essentially with the intent that William could handle the development and science part of the business and Thomas would take care of any business administration. So once he had signed on to manage such things, William Perkin was in a fairly good place to start this business, even though it did still have risks. And soon they had set up Perkin and Sons as a company and they bought a plot of land at Greenford Green in Middlesex. From there, they had to start not just a business, but really a whole industry from scratch. No one had plans for a chemical manufacturing plant, so they had to be drawn up according to what they thought they would need. Additionally, Perkins Company had to figure out a supply chain for the raw materials that they needed in large quantities. That posed its own problem. For example, the ben zine that was required could only be sourced from a coaltard distiller in Glasgow, but the ben zine that the company offered was crude and required a whole other distillation process once it got to the plant, And that same sort of problem happened again and again with other materials. But Perkin and his brother worked through these issues and in December of eighteen fifty seven they delivered their first order to Thomas Keith and Son's Dyres. Almost immediately, it became apparent that while the pigment itself was consistent, the way that fabrics took the die was not. And William had worked on this a little bit at the Polar Company, but there were still some things to work out. So silk, for example, would take the die so rapidly that if it wasn't applied in a completely uniform manner. The color would be darker or more intense anywhere the fabric had been in the die longer than another. Perkin worked with dyers to fix this problem, and similarly found ways to ensure that other textiles less prone to quickly bond with die would also uptake the pigment, and soon he had developed, of course, not only this die, but also fixatives as well as application processes that textile dyers then implemented. Perkin ran into another problem with the die business due to a paperwork error. The patent that Perkin and sons held in France for perp Will Die was invalid, and soon front plants started creating moving for die houses there that cut Perkin out of a significant revenue source. And this was particularly true because France became absolutely insessed with this die. Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon the Third, warr and set this trend for the entire country to want purple garments, and even bigger unofficial endorsement came from Queen Victoria, though Queen Victoria wore a gown died with Perkins moving to her daughter's wedding, and from there the popularity of the color spread throughout Europe and the US at a really rapid pace. Despite losing out on that French business, and because of the high profile appearance of his die on the Queen's Gown, perkins own business was booming. And keep in mind he had only just set up this die manufactured plant, and people were already setting up kind of copycat plans to do die in France, so he had already started this entire new industry. His moving die cost a hundred and twenty pounds per kilo, but it also took a lot of raw material to produce, so according to Perkins calculations, it took one pounds of coal to get ten pounds twelve ounces of coal tar, which he used to get the moving and from that ten pounds twelve ounces. The yield of moving after all of the chemical processes were complete was just one quarter of an ounce. But still, this was a superior option to natural means of accruing enough purple pigment to achieve a saturated purple tone in textiles, and perkins synthetic version was more color fast. He had had the good fortune to stumble onto a synthetic purple at exactly the right time purple had been on the rise in popularity, and the options to get it had been limited until his discovery. Just a couple of years into their chemical manufacturing venture. It became a parents of William, Thomas and George that the original plant just couldn't keep up with demand. A new facility was built in eighteen fifty nine, and from there they expanded their catalog to include more colors. The most popular remove another purple tone that was called Britannia Violet and Perkins Green. Over time, their color offerings were not used exclusively in the textile industry because Perkin and Sons Dies were the first synthetic guys to make their way onto postage stamps. Coming up, we're going to talk about how Perkin eventually stepped away from this industry he had created and what happened to his life after that. But first we'll hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class. Going a synthetic red dye proved to be difficult to create for a number of years. Thomas Dick's Perkin had actually patented a magenta manufacture process in eighteen fifty nine that the plant used briefly, but that involved handling mercury, and that process was shut down complete Lee when their workers started to become ill. Perkin, working to find an improved process, produced artificial alizarin that's a crimson dye from Anthracyne in eighteen sixty nine, and when he filed his patent on it, he discovered that another patent for essentially the same process had been filed the prior day by chemists working for the German company B A. SF. While they were both issued patents, Perkin then refined the technique with a different process and that made him able to manufacture it before B. S F could get it to market. This seemed like a big potential problem, but the two companies eventually came to an agreement that allowed Perkin and Son the English market pretty much on their own to monopolies. William Henry Perkin married for the first time in eighteen fifty nine when he was twenty one. His bride, Jemima Harriet Lasette, was his first cousin. This couple had two children together. They were William Henry Perkin Jr. Who was born in eighteen sixty and then another son, Arthur George, again the following year. Unfortunately, though Jemima died of tuberculosis in eighteen sixty one, which left William Sr. With two infant sons. Perkin remarried five years later to Alexandria Caroline Malwow who went by Sasha. He and Sasha had a son, Frederick, followed by four daughters, Sasha, Lucy, Annie, and Helen Mary. The die manufacturing plant was a thriving business, but the Perkin brothers were also constantly operating at kind of a breakneck pace, and part of that for William was that he wanted to continue his other experiments, which were not exclusively in the development of pigments. Perkin had another significant chemistry achievement in eighteen fifty eight. That year, he worked alongside another scientist B. F. Deppa, and the two produced the first lab created version of glycine. Glycine is an amino acid, and that was the first amino acid produced in a lab setting. With the same collaborate. Later, Perkins synthesized tartaric acid two years later in eighteen sixty and he was publishing about these findings and other experiments throughout his time running the business. Yeah, he kept his hand in in the scientific world throughout another process that Perkins developed while he was still in the synthetic die business was what's called the Perkin reaction. I am not a chemist, and I will mess this up if I try to extrapolate from a definition into Planer terms. So I am going to read the Miriam Webster definition of a Perkin reaction here, and it is quote A reaction for making an unsaturated aromatic acid as cinemic acid by heating and aromatic aldehyde with an acid and hydride as acidic and hydride in the presence of a base as sodium acetate or potassium carbonate. I don't want to dunk on Miriam Webster because I used Miriam Webster all the time, but I still have a number of questions after he read that. But basically what this means is that using this method, it's a lot of chemistry stuff, and I feel foolish that I don't grasp chemistry well enough to really be able to say more about it. He was able to synthesize the first artificial perfume. You made a compound called kumar in which smells like fresh moan hay. To be clear, though Perkin did not make this into a perfume. He just developed Kumaran, and it was later used in perfumes and as a flavoring for sweets. Today, perkins work, both in this area and others, is cited as the launching point for organic chemistry and all of the many industries which have developed through it. After seventeen years in the dye industry, William Perkin reached a point where he wanted to be doing his research more than he wanted to be running a business, and so on January one, seventy four, Perkin and Sons was officially sold for a hundred and five thousand pounds. While Perkin was undoubtedly ready to start a less frantic pace of his life with his finances secure from the deal, there were some problems with this sale. The plant at Greenford Green was not well run by its new owners, which was Brooke, Simpson and Spiller. They rapidly lost clients. This led the purchasers to claim that the Perkins had misled them, and they sued the Perkins, citing deception bordering on fraud. This matter was finally settled in March eighteen seventy five, with a judge ruling in the Perkins favor. Yeah, he was basically like they put together a huge dossier of like, here's everything we left these people, We told him how to do it. They did it wrong, and the judge was like, yep, they sure did. So. With this legal matter completed, William Perkins set up his home lab, He built a new house, and he settled into a life of research. This all sounds like a really idyllic retirement, but he was still just thirty seven at this point. He was a young man. In the years between founding the chemical plant and selling it, he had managed to write and publish almost two papers per year on a variety of organic chemists three subjects. Once he was free of the time limitations of industrial work, his publishing output only went up, and he wrote and published papers on his research right up until the end of his life. He also continued to enjoy art and music throughout his life, and he was able to enjoy more of these pastimes and share them with his kids in his post industry years. In nineteen o six, the fiftieth anniversary of perkins synthesis of moving, he was knighted and there were jubilee celebrations to mark the half century birthday of his revolutionary chemical accident. The official name of this anniversary festivity was the International Celebration of the Coultar Color Jubilee. It consisted of a lot of events for Perkins, who his hand all around Britain and abroad. When he traveled to the US that year, he was elected an honorary Fellow of the American Chemical Society. As part of that honor, he was given a silver punch bowl, and he said it would be good for lemonade. This is a good natured nod to his being a teetotaler. Perkin never drank. At that same ceremony he was given the Perkin Medal of the American Chemical Society. That was the first That medal is still issued annually for quote innovation and applied chemistry resulting in outstanding commercial development. One of these celebration events, which took place at the Royal Institution, this is kind of like the culmination event was described this way. Quote Sir William H. Perkin, on his appearance was received with loud and prolonged cheers. There was a large attendance of representatives of scientific societies and of commercial organizations interested in the coal tar color industry. A great many ladies were also present at that event. The Chairman of the Royal Institution, Professor R. Medola, gave a brief speech which included quote, the object for which we are assembled on the present occasion is so well known to most of you that, in the view of the long program before us, I do not propose to occupy your attention myself for more than a very few moments. It will, I am sure, be your wish in the first place, that we should take this opportunity of offering our hearty congratulations to the founder of the cold tar color industry on having lived to witness the consummation of his labors, which we are celebrating on this fiftieth anniversary. Yes, so there was no doubt during his lifetime that people thought he had really, uh completely invented this entire new field. And when Perkin wrapped up his time at the jubilee, concluded his final speech with quote, when I look back on my life and consider all the ways I have been led above all, I thank God to whom I owe everything, for all his goodness to me, and ascribe to him all the praise and honor. Perkin was Methodist, and his religion was an integral part of his identity. And how he lived his life. He made a lot of money in the chemical color industry, and he gave a lot of it away. He provided a fund to build a Methodist church in Sudbury, and he thought being a job creator was one of the best achievements of their company's success. In July of nineteen oh seven, Perkin, who had just gotten through all of this travel, which was celebrating him but really took a toll on him, started to feel ill and he did not seek medical help for several days because he was a bit wary of doctors. He also didn't think whatever was going on with serious. He did speak with a dietitian because he did not realize that he had pneumonia, and that also his appendix had burst. A doctor was finally called in, but it was too late, and Perkin died on July fourteenth, nineteen o seven. Perkins obituary and the Journal of the Society of Dires and Colorist Threat in part quote his neighbors at Sudbury loved him for his quiet philanthropy. His generous courtesy and kindness of heart were striking characteristics which strangely attached him to all those with whom he was personally acquainted. Aside from the fact that every ing from anesthetics to artificial sweeteners are often traced back to the work that Perkin did, he also left a legacy in chemistry through his children. Perkin's sons all had careers that followed in their father's footsteps. William Henry Perkin Jr. Was considered Great Britain's finest organic chemist during his life, and Arthur eventually became head of the Department of color Chemistry at University of Leeds. Frederick, his son from his second marriage, became a pioneer in low temperature carbonization. So his his tendrils in science just kept like going on and on and on and on. Uh, and we are still I think you could make a firm case enjoying the benefits of his work today. UM. I obviously love the color purple. H He's an interesting one and UH seems to have maintained a fairly kind and low key attitude throughout his life. We'll talk about that a bit more in our behind the scenes. UH. And now I have a listener mail about some of our Halloween fun This one is about haunted houses and it's from our listener Barb who writes High Ladies. I love the show and especially look forward to your October episodes. I'm also a huge fan of haunted houses, so after hearing this week's episode on the history of them, I knew I needed to write in. As a kid, I have fond memories of going through our local haunted house each year with my dad. It was an old, possibly even abandoned house on the end of my block and was run by the j C's. My dad started taking me as a pretty young child, maybe four or five. His favorite story to tell us about the first time we went at the end of the haunted house, just as you exited, there was a person who would chase you with a quote chainsaw. I'm pretty sure it was just the motor without a blade, but that sound was scary enough in the dark, my dad said. I jumped a few feet in the air, and my feet were moving before they hit the ground. I was out of there. One might think this experience would keep me away. Nope, not me. I was hooked. We went every year, sometimes more than once. When I was a little older, I would talk my friends into going with me as well. I even dragged my now husband to a haunted Schoolhouse, which had become one of my favorites to visit as a date. I had no idea about the changes in safety measures for haunted houses over the years. Are Haunted House at the end of the block moved to a new location in the early nineties, so your episode shed some light on why that might have been. Thanks so much for all the spooky October episodes. I had the pleasure to see you in person at the October Live event in Chicago and meet you afterwards. You were both so gracious and a delight to me. I hope you can come back to our area once live shows start back up. Thanks again, Barb, Barb, I hope so too. I hate three UM, I missed touring and I love Chicago. I would love to do UM. I don't know that Tracy would agree. I would do like a two month long tour of every city we've ever hit, and then some because we haven't done it in so long. Know I it's as long as we had like a break day every three days. We take a break day four maximum. Yeah, because day five of a tour I would be anymore. That's how I would like. I would wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and my body would try to take me to wear the room had the bathroom in a different hotel, and I would wind up in a corner like where am I? Yes, I think there was a time where you texted me once and asked me what airport I had landed in, and I told you I did not know, um. And then when I got to the baggage claim, I recognized the airport and was like, oh, here's where I am. I'm fine because we were in a city with multiple airports and I was like, I don't know. Um. You know, that's how it works when you're touring. Your brain gets a little fuzzy on your whereabouts. But Barb, thank you again so much, and I'm glad that that was a fun episode, and also like, I just love hearing people's life long affinities for haunts and all of the fun that Halloween in October can bring. First sure, if you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History, And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, that's super duper easy. You can do it right now. 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