--- title: How Garbage Kickstarted The Modern Chemical Industry description: Scientific experiments don't always happen according to the hypothesis, and sometimes failed experiments can even lead to new innovations. canonical: https://time.com/3576520/garbage-kickstarted-modern-chemical-industry/ author: TIME Video article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-11-10T20:36:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-01T09:03:19.176Z article:section: Science og:title: How garbage kickstarted the modern chemical industry og:description: Scientific experiments don't always happen according to the hypothesis, and sometimes failed experiments can even lead to new innovations. og:url: https://time.com/3576520/garbage-kickstarted-modern-chemical-industry/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcacfc68e277ebeda/69876808a988ca586b6aaa60/link-cfm.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2820 og:image:height: 1586 og:image:alt: Many discoveries are the result of accidents og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How garbage kickstarted the modern chemical industry twitter:description: Scientific experiments don't always happen according to the hypothesis, and sometimes failed experiments can even lead to new innovations. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcacfc68e277ebeda/69876808a988ca586b6aaa60/link-cfm.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How Garbage Kickstarted the Modern Chemical Industry > Sponsored content. 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This certainly bears true in the video above, courtesy of the [American Chemical Society](http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en.html), which explains how garbage kicked off the entire chemical industry. ## Transcript [00:00] Isaac Asimov said it best. The most exciting phrase to hear [00:03] in science, the one that heralds new discoveries is not [00:06] Eureka, but, that's funny. Throughout the history [00:10] of science, many major discoveries came accidentally. [00:14] Sometimes they came from recognizing potential in an [00:16] unexpected product or even in a failed recipe's waste, [00:20] turning accident into serendipity. Other times discovery [00:24] came out of pure desperation from a seemingly dead end [00:27] experiment. See the entire modern chemical industry can [00:31] be attributed to an accidental discovery that started with [00:34] well, garbage. [ MUSIC ] In [00:43] the 19th century there was a new kind of waste floating [00:45] around: [ NOISE ] coal tar. This was a stinky, sticky, [00:50] awful muck left over from turning coal into gas light. Before [00:54] others figured out you could pave roads with the stuff, it [00:57] was pretty much useless. Then the head of London's Royal [01:01] College of Chemistry had an idea. August Wilhelm von [01:04] Hofmann noticed that some of the stuff in coal tar was [01:07] similar to the stuff in known medicines. If you got the [01:10] chemistry right, he thought, the world would have cheap, [01:13] easy cures for disease. So in 1856, he assigned [01:18] 18- year- old William Perkin to Team Coal Tar. Perkin's job [01:22] was to try to turn the gunk into quinine. Quinine was used [01:26] to treat malaria but the drug had to be extracted from tree [01:29] bark and that was time consuming and really annoying. [01:33] Perkin knew that quinine and coal tar had similar chemical [01:36] formulas so he figured take some of the stuff that's in coal [01:39] tar that's similar to quinine. And some other stuff that looks [01:43] like little bits of quinine then remove useless byproducts [01:46] then Voila !, right? Yeah, not so much .>> Perkins [01:52] first attempts got a reddish black powder instead of off white [01:55] quinine crystals. So he made a couple of changes and [01:58] tried it again. Instead of off white powder, he got an even [02:01] blacker powder. Oh well, wash it out with a little alcohol [02:04] and start it over right? But wait, when he added the alcohol [02:08] the black powder produced a breathtaking purple. Perkin [02:12] was inspired he somehow figured out this purple stuff could [02:15] dye silk, Perkins saw dollar signs at the time purple [02:19] dyed fabrics were made using exotic crushed snails, so [02:23] only the very wealthy could afford to wear purple. Forget [02:26] crushed snails. Perkin just made purple dye out of garbage. [02:30] Perkin called this stuff mauve, after a French flower, [02:33] because well, you know, trashy purple didn't quite sound [02:36] appealing. Dreaming of broad profit margins, Perkin did [02:40] what many entrepreneurs did. He quit, and started perhaps [02:44] the first artificial dye factory. Within a few years mauve [02:48] had two influential fashion fans: Queen Victoria, and [02:52] Napoleon the Third's wife, Empress Eugénie. A fashion [02:56] craze known as mauve measles erupted and suddenly, the [02:59] middle class could afford a color beyond drab brown or [03:02] off- white or gray. Perkins amassed a fortune of more than [03:06] 100 million in today's dollars, and retired at the ripe old [03:10] age of 36. On Perkins' lead, chemical factories sprang [03:14] up, dumpster diving nature for treasure. And this led to [03:18] even more profitable accidents. In 1878, Constantine [03:22] Fallberg brought his gunky coal tar work home with him by [03:26] not washing his hands. At dinner one night he found his [03:30] bread incredible sweet. Fahlberg and his lab mates [03:33] realized the source was a super sweet substance derived [03:37] from coal tar residue they called saccharine. The [03:40] accidental discoveries only grew in the 20th century. In late [03:43] 1930s, Roy Plunkett at DuPont was working with [03:46] refrigerants named fluorinated hydrocarbons. One day [03:50] a new mix, annoyingly, solidified into a powder that made [03:55] stuff slippery. Plunkett had stumbled on a new material [03:58] called polytetrafluoroethylene, which DuPont marketed as [04:03] Teflon. Teflon was awesome! It coated metal for a no- stick [04:07] surface! And also, Teflon didn't conduct electricity, so it [04:10] was great for wire coating. This led father and son team Bill [04:14] and Bob Gore to work with Teflon to make computer [04:17] cables. Bill and Bob discovered that Teflon didn't stretch [04:20] evenly, making it hard to work with. Frustrated, Bob [04:25] yanked on a hunk of heated teflon and suddenly it [04:27] expanded to eight times it's size. Turns out, [04:31] this heated stretched hunk was over 70 % air. So it could [04:35] breathe easily while retaining the no stick properties of it's [04:38] teflon parent. And if you wove this into a fabric, it proved [04:43] fantastic for lightweight raincoats that don't wrap you in [04:46] your own sauna. You know this material as Gore- Tex. [04:52] So much of what we enjoy in the modern world came from [04:54] accidental discoveries. Be it fashion cause causing mauve, [04:59] sweeteners, teflon or Bortex. The Chemists behind this stuff [05:03] were smart enough to recognise that they accidentally [05:06] discovered something special. In the process, these [05:09] moments became so much more than happy accidents. [05:12] They became discoveries that changed the world. Hey [05:16] chem heads thanks for watching if you want more Sam [05:19] Keen check out a video he did for us on whether mega [05:21] sharks still exist, and if you want more history check out [05:24] five black chemists who changed the world, and regardless [05:28] click that there subscribe button for more chemistry [05:30] goodness every week. 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