Lights. Camera. RCNM.

Mauve Well imagine this – you’re in your all-serious mood, determined  and have your heart set on finding the perfect cure to malaria but all that remains, is a sludge of sticky, ugly looking piece of your attempt in your apparatus – frustrating, isn’t it? Well , apparently not in the case of chemist William Perkin, who now is accredited by the world for his irreplaceable discovery of the first synthetic dye. Perkin was an 18-year old student at the Royal College of London when he attempted to find an artificial alternative for quinine, an anti-malarial drug derived from tree barks which were highly expensive and time-consuming – despite countless tries, he wasn’t successful. However, during one of his experiments, he discovered a thick purple sludge; the color immediately caught his eye. The product, made of carbon-rich tar from distilled coal took on an interesting shade of purple, a color much in demand by the textile industry at the time. Perkin isola