William Henry Perkin

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William Henry Perkin bigraphy, stories - Chemist

William Henry Perkin : biography

12 March 1838 – 14 July 1907

Sir William Henry Perkin, FRS (12 March 1838 – 14 July 1907) was an English chemist best known for his discovery, at the age of 18, of the first aniline dye, mauveine.

Early years

William Perkin was born in the East End of London, the youngest of the seven children of George Perkin, a successful carpenter. His mother, Sarah, was of Scottish descent but moved to east London as a child.UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography (2003). Accessed 18 March 2008. He was baptised in the parish church of St Paul’s, Shadwell, which had been connected to such luminaries as James Cook, Jane Randolph Jefferson (mother of Thomas Jefferson) and John Wesley.

At the age of 14, Perkin attended the City of London School, where he was taught by Thomas Hall, who fostered his scientific talent and encouraged him to pursue a career in chemistry.

Honours and awards

Perkin received many honours in his lifetime. In June 1866, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1879, received their Royal Medal and, in 1889, their Davy Medal. He was knighted in 1906, and in the same year was awarded the first Perkin Medal, established to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his discovery of mauveine. Today the Perkin Medal is widely acknowledged as the highest honour in American industrial chemistry and has been awarded annually by the American section of the Society of Chemical Industry to many inspiring and gifted chemists.

Later years

Blue plaque in [[Cable Street.]]

William Perkin continued active research in organic chemistry for the rest of his life: he discovered and marketed other synthetic dyes, including Britannia Violet and Perkin’s Green ; he discovered ways to make coumarin, one of the first synthetic perfume raw materials, and cinnamic acid. (The reaction used to make the latter became known as the Perkin reaction.) Local lore has it that the colour of the nearby Grand Union Canal changed from week to week depending on the activity at Perkin’s Greenford dyeworks. In 1869, Perkin found a method for the commercial production from anthracene of the brilliant red dye alizarin, which had been isolated and identified from madder root some forty years earlier in 1826 by the French chemist Pierre Robiquet, simultaneously with purpurin, another red dye of lesser industrial interest, but the German chemical company BASF patented the same process one day before he did. Over the next few years, Perkin found his research and development efforts increasingly eclipsed by the German chemical industry, and so in 1874 he sold his factory and retired from business, a very wealthy man.

Perkin’s GravestonePerkin died in 1907 of pneumonia and appendicitis. He is buried in the grounds of Christchurch, Harrow, UK. He had married twice: firstly in 1859 to Jemima Harriet, the daughter of John Lissett and secondly in 1866 to Alexandrine Caroline, daughter of Helman Mollwo. He had two sons from the first marriage (William Henry Perkin, Jr. and Arthur George Perkin) and one son (Frederick Mollwo Perkin) and four daughters from the second. All three sons became chemists. Perkin was a Liveryman of the Leathersellers’ Company for 46 years and was elected Master of the Company for the year 1896-97; his father and grandfather had also been Liverymen of the same Company.The Leathersellers’ Review 2005-06, pp 12-14

Today blue plaques mark the sites of Perkin’s home in Cable Street, by the junction with King David Lane, and the Perkin factory in Greenford.

Discovery of mauveine

In 1853, at the precocious age of 15, Perkin entered the Royal College of Chemistry in London (now part of Imperial College London), where he began his studies under August Wilhelm von Hofmann.Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911 edition. Accessed 18 March 2008. At this time, chemistry was still in a quite primitive state: although the atomic theory was accepted, the major elements had been discovered, and techniques to analyse the proportions of the elements in many compounds were in place, it was still a difficult proposition to determine the arrangement of the elements in compounds. Hofmann had published a hypothesis on how it might be possible to synthesise quinine, an expensive natural substance much in demand for the treatment of malaria. Perkin, who had by then become one of Hofmann’s assistants, embarked on a series of experiments to try to achieve this end. During the Easter vacation in 1856, while Hofmann was visiting his native Germany, Perkin performed some further experiments in the crude laboratory in his apartment on the top floor of his home in Cable Street in east London. It was here that he made his great discovery: that aniline could be partly transformed into a crude mixture which when extracted with alcohol produced a substance with an intense purple colour. Perkin, who had an interest in painting and photography, immediately became enthusiastic about this result and carried out further trials with his friend Arthur Church and his brother Thomas. Since these experiments were not part of the work on quinine which had been assigned to Perkin, the trio carried them out in a hut in Perkin’s garden, so as to keep them secret from Hofmann.