William Henry Perkin

Sir William Henry Perkin was an English chemist and entrepreneur, born in the East End of London in 1838, the youngest of seven children of a carpenter. He attended the City of London School, where a teacher encouraged his interest in chemistry, and in 1853, at fifteen, he entered the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London, to study under August Wilhelm von Hofmann. While failing to synthesise quinine for malaria he made the first commercial synthetic organic dye, mauveine, from aniline, at the age of eighteen. He set up a factory to produce it, which helped found the synthetic organic chemicals industry, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1866.