Fascinating Fails

So purple is one of the rarest colors in nature.

That means that most of the purple that we see in the world around us today, like the purple of this backdrop, or this eyeshadow, or my jumpsuit was actually invented.

just by like some 18 year old guy, just a dude.

And only that.

But it was invented by accident.

Steph: Dude...dude.

Maren: Sorry Steph: We're going to have to clean that up.

Okay.

Maren: We could use a makeup sponge?

Steph: okay, alright...good intro, guys.

Okay, so there are actually two different kinds of ways of making things purple.

One of them is pigments.

The other one is dyes.

I thought this was gonna beok, there we go thought it was gonna be so much easier to crumble.

Pigments are a bunch of tiny colored particles and they won't dissolve in something else.

If I put this eyeshadow in water for example, it's still just going to stay separate.

Like it's still just going to be purple particles floating around in water, even if I mixed them they won't combine.

And in chemistry, this is what we call something that's insoluble.

So most pigments are insoluble.

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

But dyes are a little bit different 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 impart 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.

Steph: um...whered the lollipop come from?!

Maren: It's for demonstration purposes!

because sometimes food has dye in it also.

So lots of things in our day to day lives have dyes in themyes, like some foods, and cosmetics like nail polish or shampoo and conditioner.

And these dyes either give the product itself its color, or are there to then impart a color onto the thing it's being applied to , like long lasting color stain.

Offscreen: But how did someone accidentally invent purple?

Right?

Okay, yes.

And to get to that, we actually have to go back in time.

Actually, it's still 2023, but let me set the scene.

The 18 year old dude in question is William Henry Perkin, and he is a young up-and-comer at the Royal Society of Chemistry and listen His dad didn't want him to become a chemist, he wanted him to be an architect.

And William is studying under somebody who's basically rock star level famous in the chemistry world.

So he's really trying to prove himself 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're going to take a quick break to talk about the British Empire.

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

Quinine was a medicine used to treat a very serious disease that you may have heard of, called malaria, and it was a huge problem at the time.

It actually still affects hundreds of millions of people every year.

But in Perkins 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 for malaria prevention and treatment today, chemists 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 malaria, but this was the height of the British Empire.

A lot of British colonies were in places where malaria was common, so an ability to prevent and treat malaria was essential to the British Empire, and its ability to hold on which 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 university on Easter break in his childhood 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 dangerous to work with chemicals in a not properly ventilated space, and it's kind of a miracle that William didn't blow himself up or poison himself.

So there he is.

Its 1856.

He's trying to prove himself to the scientific community by making something incredibly important and...

He fails.

He starts with this substance called aniline.

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 failed to make this impossible molecule 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 washing out his equipment, but when he added alcohol to his failed goop, he gets purple.

Like a gorgeous, vibrant purple.

Offscreen: So he just invented purple dye?

I wasn't *just* anything, dude, this is like a huge deal, haven't you noticed how rare purple is in nature?

Color, if we're going for the physics definition, is different kinds of light, and light is a kind of energy.

That energy comes in different levels.

So for visible light or the colors, we can see, it ranges on a spectrum from 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 only reflecting the violet wavelength back at us to be absorbed and received by our eyes, and then processed by our brain.

So this is the core of why so few things in nature actually produce a purple or a blue pigment.

It's because those wavelengths are the highest energy wavelengths, and nothing wants to go through the trouble of producing a pigment that reflects back all of that good energy.

They want to keep it for themselves.

Most of the animals that we think of out in nature as being blue or purple 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.

So it's a lie.

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 organisms 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 incapable, genetically speaking, of producing blue and violet pigments, it's actually kind of a bummer.

All of this is why it is so difficult to find purple in nature, and why making purple to dye our clothes or make cosmetics or dye our hair is such an art form.

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

Offscreen: that was amazing, keep it.

Maren: stunning.

Lucy: If we go back in time here in the UK in the medieval period, I've got some some things to show you.

This is very, odiferous.

It smells a bit like, um...manure yep, thats the word I was gonna use!

Its been fermented.

This is actually woad leaves.

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 considered a weed these days, but it's a specific dyer's plant so it makes a gorgeous primer yellow.

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

So to make purple here we would actually dye a textile with our madder.

And then we'd overdye it with our woad.

So that's not a straight purple from nature.

So we're adding two colors together to create a purple.

Yeah.

My favorite story about how people used to create purple straight from nature was they found this snail, the murex snail, it actually Has a gland that produces a purple mucus.

It's beautiful.

Yeah.

Delicious.

So you have to go out into the ocean, collect snails, then extract the glands, then ferment them in these huge big basins 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.

Its 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 murex snails on us I'm guessing?

No, we've got some cochineal though.

What is cochineal?

So, if you pass me that little shell there, I've got a little shell which has got some insects in it.

Dried.

Whoa, I don't know that those were bugs...

They're actually dried full bodies of female, cochineal insects.

So we want to extract the dye from inside their body.

So we need to break down the, essentially the structure of their bodies to release these 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 talk about murex, you need several thousand.

Yep.

So the scalabilityyeah is not really there for that.

Yeah.

When we're talking about natural pigments, right, one batch of this dye might look different from another.

Like it's not going to be quite as consistent, right, because the bugs are different or the water is different or the amount we used is different.

Seasonal variation.

It's kind of a double-edged sword in a way, because it's the impurities that make them special and make them specific to a place, but it can also, yeah, stop you getting that, that sort of...that batch, that perfect batch every single time.

The uniformity, yeah.

Now all of this is why when young William Henry Perkin finds himself with a surprise bottle of purple, he takes it and he runs with it because he sees an opportunity.

And only one year after his accidental discovery, he has already started 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 it the mauve measles.

Not only was Perkins 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 new found availability of all of this color enabled the industrialization of pretty much everything, including clothes and textiles.

Because this is around the same time that we're developing the ability to mass produce all kinds of stuff.

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 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 something called coal tar, which is about as gross as it sounds.

It's the black sludge stuff that's left over after you process coal for use as fuel.

And 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 of synthetic dye, this problem has only gotten worse.

Like, for example, today, over 20% of the entire world's water pollution comes from the dyeing and finishing stages of textile production...

20%!!!

Waste in the industrial dying 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 are toxic and cancer causing too many of the organisms that live there.

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

And it's kind of hard to imagine a world where we don't have access to all of these colors anymore.

Right?

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 access to all of these colors, but we're not doing quite as much damage to our environment?

The good news is that there is lots of amazing science devoted to solving exactly this problem, and one of my favorite solutions is definitely not going to be what you're expecting, because it's bacteria.

Hi!

Ruth: Did I just ruin that?

Maren: No, no, that was perfect!

I'm looking at how pigment-producing microorganisms like bacteria can be used to print textiles for industry.

There's two different sides to the development.

You've got pigment producing organisms that naturally do that.

So the one that we've been using the paper, one that I use quite a bit, is found predominantly in the soil.

It naturally produces a purple pigment.

But you can also use organisms and actually design them, build them to synthetic engineering to make colors.

So you could have found that color DNA through other things in nature.

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

And you can then actually put that in there.

Because you could take the like.

You're saying the genes from a certain organism that produces a certain pigment, you 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 make it in this more sustainable way.

This bacteria is called janthinobacterium lividum, its mostly found in the soil.

And it produces a purple pigment called violacein.

It's not actually producing it so that it actually is producing it for part of its internal function.

So it could be using this pigment as a fighting mechanism.

There are some organisms that use that pigment to protect them from UV light.

The advantage of that is that we can ferment it in large quantities and then use it for our own processing.

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

It's really important that it is neutralized that it's dead before we take it outside of a lab.

We don't want it getting out anywhere with where it shouldn't.

So a really important step once it comes out of the incubator, once it's grown enough pigment, we can.

I'm going to put it into the autoclave, which is a machine that heats up to between 121 and 126. degrees celsius.

We know that it will die at that temperature.

I then use this machine here, the centrifuge, to concentrate it down, to separate the cells that have the pigment from the supernatant that it is grown in.

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 our shirt.

stunning.

I love color, and over time, I was teaching about sustainable textiles., I realized how environmentally problematic the color industry is, specifically for textiles.

Pigments produced by microorganisms opens up a whole new color palette and a whole new way of doing it.

This fermentation technology already exists.

For making beer, right?

Making beer for things like pharmaceuticals, so you can actually do it in quite a small landspace.

You can do it quite quickly and efficiently.

It's using less energy.

It's using less water.

It's not the case that everything natural is good, everything synthetic is bad.

But if you're using a chemical, a dye, a pigment that is already found in nature, 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.

Oh no, this should actually be showing a lot of purple pigment.

This is what this one should look like.

But sometimes bacteria go on strike.

They all have their own agenda.

So you know, sometimes if you're not doing what it wants, it won't do what you want.

A typical scientific approach is this is incorrect, this is gone wrong, lets discard it 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 something else?

And it wasn't a case of success or failure, it was looking at the creative possibilities involved with working with a microorganism, which I really love.

So I think bringing together science and design is amazing.

I think scientists are very creative.

A lot of people refer to creativity as solving problems, which scientists do very well.

And I think that in the science community, there's this kind of stigma against failures and mistakes.

And a lot of the conversations Ive had is scientists saying, actually, if we could publish mistakes, we could talk about it, we would waste less time because you can look at the research of someone thats done what you were talking about doing and it didn't work, and you either don't go down that or you take actually something that they learned from that mistake.

We make more progress faster if we share what didn't work.

Exactly!

There's some ping pong happening and they're getting really excited.

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 failure then maybe our mistakes can be discoveries too.

Speeding.

Sound speed.

Five take one, common slate.

...dyes in them.

And my next line is... Ahhhh dont drop the monitor!

Okay, still rolling.

And this smells exactly like crayons, actually, And you put that in your mouth!

Yay!

I cannot get over the fact that this was dyed using bacteria.