‘The Triumph of Colour’: the synthetic colour revolution

Matthew Winterbottom

‘The violet mauve led the way, followed by the red magenta, the blue azuline, the yellow phosphine, the green emeraldine, the orange aurine, by purple, and brown, and black. […] The world rubbed its eyes with astonishment; and truly it seemed almost as wonderful to produce the colours of the rainbow from a lump of coal, as to extract sunshine from cucumbers.’136

An 1860s day dress worn by Mary Eleanor Cunliffe (1846–1896), daughter of a Leicester Baptist minister, still astonishes the modern viewer with the intensity of its vivid purple colour (fig. 2.1.1). One can imagine the impact it would have had on her contemporaries. That a respectable, middle-class young woman in an English regional town could wear such an extraordinarily coloured dress was down to a seismic revolution in the dye industry that had started in the previous decade. This ‘Second Industrial Revolution’137 would transform the modern world and lead to the democratisation of colour for the masses.

For thousands of years, textiles had been coloured using traditional natural dyes made from plants and some insects and animals. Many of these, such as madder, indigo and cochineal, were produced in faraway lands in Asia and the Americas. Traditional dyes were often expensive and difficult to work with and their supply could be precarious. Imperial expansion had helped guarantee the supply of some key dyes, such as Indian indigo, for British textile manufacturers.

‘Co A l into Colour’

[2.1.1] Day dress worn by Mary Eleanor Cunliffe (1846–1896), English, late 1860s. Aniline dyed silk, glass beads. Manchester Art Gallery, 1951.207

Brightly coloured textiles and clothes were the preserve of the wealthy and powerful, and were key markers of status and taste. This all changed in 1856 when William Henry Perkin (1838–1907) (fig. 2.1.2), an 18-year-old student and assistant of German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann (1818–1892), the brilliant Head of the Royal College of Chemistry in London, produced aniline purple, a vivid violet dye, from coal tar. This was the first of the so-called aniline dyes and it is considered the world’s first commercial synthetic dye. Coal tar was a thick, sticky black effluent – the material that remained when coal was converted into the gas that, since the 1820s had been used for lighting. As the demand for gas lighting increased, so too did the problem of disposing of this hazardous industrial waste. Considered of no commercial use, it was dumped, often into rivers, poisoning the water. Some chemists, including Hoffmann, were intrigued by the chemical possibilities of this noxious ‘gas liquor’. Incredibly chemically complex and rich in elements that form the basic building blocks of organic chemistry, Hofmann believed it was possible artificially to