###The Great Purple Sludge Mistake
London, England, 1856 — A teenager's botched attempt to invent a malaria cure ended up creating a sludge that changed global fashion forever.
During his 1856 Easter holiday, eighteen-year-old chemistry student William Henry Perkin received a tough assignment: artificially synthesize the malaria medicine quinine from coal tar. Scientists didn't yet understand molecular geometry, so Perkin tried adding and subtracting atoms like a simple math problem.
Perkin mixed a compound called aniline with potassium dichromate, hoping for a pristine medical breakthrough. Instead, the experiment failed spectacularly. The messy chemical reaction left the bottom of his glass flask coated in a thick, sticky, dirty black sludge.
Frustrated, Perkin poured alcohol into the ruined beaker to wash it out. As the alcohol hit the gross black muck, the sludge suddenly dissolved into a breathtakingly brilliant purple liquid. By testing it on fabric, he realized he hadn't made medicine—he had invented "Mauveine," the world's first synthetic dye.
The Great Purple Sludge Mistake — London, England, 1856