How To Accidentally Invent A Color

That means that most of the purp e that we see in the world around us today, like the purple of this backdrop or this eye shadow or my jumpsuit, was actually INVENTED.

Just by, like...some 18 year-old guy.

Just a dude!

And not only that- (offscreen) Whoa, whoa.

But it was invented by accid Dude - Sorry!

Gotta - we're going to have to clean that Okay, alright.

Good intro take, guys.

Ok, so: there are actually two d fferent kinds of ways of making things purple.

One of them is pigments.

The other one is dyes.

I thought this was going t I thought it#d be so much easier Pigments are a bunch of tiny If I put this eyeshadow in water for example, it's still just going to stay separate.

Like, it's still just going to b purple particles floating around in water.

Even if I mix them, they won't combine.

And in chemistry, this is what w call somethin So most pigments are insoluble.

So yeah, because most cosmetics contain just pig they are like a layer of color that sit on top of something like your skin to provide the color we can see.

But dyes are a little bit differ nt because they do dissolve in whatever they're in, like oil or water.

That makes them what we call soluble.

And it means that they can impar that color to whatever you're trying to make a color.

Like, say, your skin or your hair, like with hair dye, or with fabric.

And this is what is so important.

It's because that liquid itself that is a purple dye is purple, like the purple is chemically bound to the liquid.

This is going to be important for later.

Dyes: chemically binding.

(offscreen) Where#d the lollipop come from?

It#s for demonstration purposes.

Because sometimes food has dye in it also.

(crew laughter) So lots of things in our day to day lives have like some foods and cosmetics, l ke nail polish or shampoo and conditioner.

And these dyes either give the p oduct itself its color or are there to then impart a color onto the thing it's bein applied to onto like a long-lasting color stain.

(Bahar) But how did someone accidentally invent purple?

Right.

Okay.

Yes.

And to get to that, we actually Actually, it's still 2023, but let me set the scene.

The 18 year old dude in question is named William Henry Perkin, and he is a young up and comer a the Royal Society of Chemistr And listen, his dad didn't want him to become a chemist.

He wanted him to be an architect.

And William is studying under someone wh So he's really trying to prove h mself to his dad, to his mentor, to the world at large.

And he's doing that by taking on one of the most difficult challenges in chemistry, which is creating a synthetic version of quinine.

And this is where we gotta take a quick break to talk about the British Empire.

This is related to the invention of purple, I promise.

See, quinine was a medicine used to treat a very serious disease that you may hav And it was a huge problem at the time.

It actually still affects hundreds of millions o But in Perkin#s time, the only drug that could prevent and treat malaria was quinine.

And the only source of quinine was the bark of this tree.

Actually, that's still true, even though we use other drugs Ch emists were only able to fully synthesize the molecule in 2001.

Quinine is just like a really hard molecule to make.

So if William had succeeded in making a synthetic version of quinine it would have been an incredibly impressive feat of chemistry.

But it also would have been a huge deal not only for the treatment of mala but this was the height of the British Empire.

A lot of British colonies were in places where So an ability to prevent and treat malaria was essential to the British Empire ability to hold on to its colonial control in those countries.

So that's at play here, too.

But okay, back to the moment of discovery.

William Perkin is home from univsersit home, which was in a building exactly on this site.

And he is messing around with some chemicals just working in the dark by the light of a gas lamp, mixing some chemicals together.

Don't do this, by the way.

It's incredibly dang And it's kind of a miracle that William didn't blow himself up or poison h There he is.

It#s 1856.

He's trying to prove himself to the sci incredibly important and he fails.

He starts with t He adds sulfuric acid and potassium dichromate and gets not quinine.

He gets a pile of black, sludgy stuff.

But instead of being disappointed that he and throwing everything out and starting again, he takes the time to study the stuff he didn't mean to make.

Now it's unclear whether he did this on purpose or if he was just wash But when he added alcohol to his failed goop, he gets purple like gorgeous, vibrant purple.

(offscreen) So he just invented purple dye?

Well, it wasn't just anything, dude.

This is, like, a huge deal.

Haven't you noticed Color, if we're going for the physics definition is And light is a kind of energy.

That energy comes in different levels.

So for visible light or the colors fr om low energy over here with red to high energy over here with purple, which we should actually technically be calling violet.

And this part is essential to understanding how humans experience color.

Because if we see something that's purple, or we should really say violet, that thing is actually anything but violet.

It's absorbing all wavelengths of light except for violet, and it's on the violet wavelength back at us to be absorbed and received by So this is the core of why so fe things in nature actually produce a purple or a blue pigment.

It's because those wavelengths are the highest energy wavelengths and nothing want to go through the trouble of producing a pigment that reflects back all of that They want to keep it for themselves.

Most of the animals that we think of out in nat actually aren#t, it's a really advanced optical illusion.

Instead of producing a purple or blue pigment, there's something about them physically structurally, on the micro or nano level that's reflecting those wavelengths back.

So they're not like actually purple.

It's a little bit of a cheat.

(offscreen) So ... it#s a I mean, kind of?

Like, most blue and purple in nature is a little bit of a lie.

Some organisms take on that color from the food that they eat, and any of the rare o that actually do put in the work to produce blue and violet pigments have evolved to do so for very specific reasons.

Like some do it to attract pollinators, some because the pigment acts as a natural sunscreen that protects them from the sun's rays.

And mammals, we're completely incap it's actually kind of a bummer.

All of this is why i and why making purple to dye our clothes or make cosmetics or dye our hair is such an art form.

And why I am so excited that we are going to do it today.

(laughter) (offscreen) That was amazing, keep it!

Stunning.

I# ve got some things to show you.

This is very, um, odiferous.

It smells a bit like, um, manure.

Yep, that#s the word I was going to use.

It#s been fermented.

So this is actua So the woad is a plant which is very similar to indigo, and this would have produced a very beautiful deep blue.

We#ve got weld, which is a beautiful - actually, it#s conside It#s a specific dyer#s plant, so it makes a gorgeous primary yellow.

And then lastly of this kind of primary triangle that we have, we#ve got madder, which is our red.

So, to make a purple here, we#d dye a textile with our madder, and then we#d overdye it with our woad.

So that#s not a straight purple from nature, right?

(Lucy) No.

We#re adding two colors together to create a purple.

(Luc My favorite story about how people used to create purple st was they found this, um, snail?

The murex snail?

(Lucy) Yeah, the murex.

The murex sn That has a gland that produces a purple mucus.

(Lucy) Beautiful.

(laughter) Yeah.

#chef#s kiss# Delicious.

You have to go out into the ocean, co then extract the glands, then ferment them in these huge big b and process that gland to make this purple dye, Incredibly time-intensive, which made it incredibly expensive, and apparently that#s why purple is a royal color.

Because it used to be so expensive and so hard to make.

So how are we going to make purple today?

Because we don#t have any mure (L ucy) No, we#ve got some cochineal, though.

What is cochineal?

(Lucy) Sorry, could you pass me that little shell there?

Su (Lucy) I#ve got a little shell which ha Whoa, I did not know that those were bugs.

They#re actually dried full bodies So we want to extract the dye from inside their bodies.

So we need to break down the - essentially, the structure of the to release those colorants into the water that we've got here.

In order to dye a garment with cochineal, you#ll need about several hundred beetles.

If we#re talking about murex, you#ll need several thousand.

(Maren) Yep.

The scalability is not really there for that.

(Lucy) Yeah.

When we're talking about natural pigments, right, one batch of this dye might look d Like it's not going to be quite as consistent, right?

Because the bugs are different or the water (Lucy) Seasonal variation... it's kind of a double ed it's the impurities that make them special Bu t it can also, yes, stop you getting that that sort of that batch, that perfect batc (Maren) The uniformity.. Now, all o when young William Henry he takes it and he runs with it, because he sees an opportunity.

And only one year after his accidental discovery, he has already st his very own factory right here on the banks of this canal on the outskirts of London.

And soon the whole Victorian world is awash in the complete rainbow.

Although they still have a particular fondness for purple.

In fact, Punch magazine, in a cartoon at the time, calls Not only was Perkin#s purple the accidental invention of the entire synthetic dye industry, but his methods also led to chemical advancements in the pharmaceutical industry, and the perfume industry, in explosives and plastics, and other art and science, melding fields like photography.

And this newfound availability of all of this color enabled the industrialization of pretty much everything, including clothes and textiles.

See, because this is around the same time that we're develop And because these synthetic dyes are so much easier to make and cheaper and faster and therefore more profitable to produce, we can now make all kinds of stuff in a whole range of colors.

You don't need to wait for a natural dye crop or insect to grow and then harvest it and then process it.

You kind of just need a factory, a lot of water and chemicals.

Chemicals like this substance called aniline.

The problem is that aniline is made from somethi which is about as gross as it sounds.

It's the black sludge stuff An d most of the synthetic dyes that we still use today are based in aniline or something very similar, which means that 99% of the dyes that we use to color our textiles today are fossil fuel byproducts.

And this is where we come back to the fact that dyes are soluble, meaning they are chemically bound to the water they're in.

When Perkins factory was here in the 1850s, they used to just dump all of their leftovers from the dyeing process into this canal.

And in the over a century and a half since the accidental invention Li ke, for example, today over 20% of the entire world's water pollution comes from the dying and finishing stages of textile production.

20%!

Waste from the industrial dyeing process is still primarily just released into the surrounding waterways around a factory and often untreated.

And when those dyes get into the waterways, they can disrupt ecological processes that are toxic and cancer causing to many of the organisms that live there.

And they make that water unsafe for pretty much any human to use at all.

And it's kind of hard And it#s k It's quite obvious that I am quite a big fan of brightly colored clothing.

So the question is, how do we find a solution where we still have to all of these colors, but we're not doing quite as much damage to our environm The good news is that there is lots of amazing science de And one of my favorite solutions is definitely not going to be what you're expecting because it's bacteria.

Hi.

No, you know, this is great.

(Ruth) Did I just ruin it?

No, no, no.

That was perfect.

(Ruth) I'm looking at how like bacteria, can be used to print textiles Th ere's two different sides to the development.

You've got pigment producing organisms that n So the one that we've been using, the purple one th predominantly in the soil.

It naturally produces a and actually design them, build them through synthetic engineering to make colo So you could have found that color DNA through other things in nature.

It could be a parrot's feather, it could be a flower, it could be a berry.

And you can then actually put that in.

So there#s those two different sides.

Right, because you could take the - like you were saying, the genes from a that produces a certain pigment, insert them into the bacteria to make them like your tiny little biological factories so you can have a pigment that you want to target.

And then you can ask the bacteria to mak This bacteria is called janthinobacterium lividum.

It's mostly found in the soil and it produces a purple pigment for violacein.

It's not actually producing it so that it looks beautiful So it could be using this pigment as a fighting mechanism, and there are some organisms that use their pigments to protect them from UV li The advantage of that is that we can ferment it in large quantities and then use it for our own processes.

How do we get from like a live organism to something that we print on clothing?

It's really importan before we take it outside of a lab.

We don't want it g So a really important step, once it we are then going to put it into the autoclave, which is the machine that heats it up to between 121 and 126 degrees Celsius.

We know that it will die at that temperature.

I then use this machine here, th to separate the cells that have the pigment from the supernatant that it is gr And that allows me to make a printing paste in different shades of purple.

So each time I pull the squeegee down or push it up, it prints a layer of purple onto Oooh, ahh, stunning.

I love color and over time I was teaching about sustai I realized how environmentally problematic the color industry is specifical So pigment produced by microorganisms opens up a whole new color Th is fermentation technology already exists.

(Maren) Like for making beer, Ma king beer, for things like pharmaceuticals.

So you can actually do it in quite a small land sp You can do it quite quickly and efficiently.

It's using less energy, it's using less natural is good, everything synthetic is bad.

But if you're using a chemical, a dye, a then if it then goes back into that ecosystem afterwards, the hope is that it's going to have less of an environmental impact.

Unfortunately, this one has not grown.

(Maren) So this should actually be showing a lo This is what this one should look like.

(Maren) Sometimes bacteria go on strike.

They all have their own agenda.

So, you know, so So the typical scientific approach is this is incorrect, this has gone wrong.

Let's just got it is my approach as a designer was much more of an exploration So I was looking at, okay, this has gone wrong.

But actually what has come from that What can I use for somet And it wasn't a case of success or It was looking at the creative poss which I really love.

So I t I think scientists are very creative.

A lot of people refer to cr And I think that in the science community, there's this kind of stigma against failures or mistakes.

And a lot of the conversation we could talk about it, we would waste less time.

Because you can look at the research as who's done what you were talking ab And you either don't go down that or you tak from that mistake.

(Maren) Ma Exactly.

(distant yelling) There#s some ping pong happening and they'r I hope that this episode has helped you see that science is creative.

You can be a scientist who works in the arts or an artist who works in the sciences.

And now you know that we have purple around us today because someone failed.

So I hope that now when you see purple in the world around you today, you're reminded that if we can stay curious and creative in the face of th en maybe our mistakes can be discoveries too.

(Off-screen) Scene five.

Take one.

Common slate.

Mark it.

(Maren) ...dyes in them.

And my next line is... Ahhhhhh don#t drop the Ok , still rolling.

This smells exactly like crayons, actually, (Off-screen) and you put that in your mouth.

Yeah.

I cannot get over the fact that this was dyed using BACTERIA!

It's so cool.