Pre-Spring Break Lecture

Being in the middle of spring-break season and with Easter on the horizon I make my annual admonition to my students on the proper use of spring-break.  To this end, I tell them of a 18 year old student of organic chemistry at the Royal College in London who used his Easter Break to undertake in his parents home the synthesis of a compound of great importance to the health of his nation and the world.  He failed to synthesized the drug, but discovered a compound that would change the world.

Of course I am speaking of William Henry Perkin.  The drug was quinine and the compound he discovered was mauve or aniline purple.

I point out to my students that young Perkin quit school, against the advice of his faculty mentor, and started a dye works, where like today's internet entrepreneurs, he became extremely rich.  So rich in fact that he retired at age thirty-seven to devote the rest of his life to the study of organic chemistry.

Of course the dye industry begat the modern synthetic pharmaceutical industry and modern organic chemistry, so Perkins 1856 Easter-Break serves as the model of what the break should be.  Kind of makes the bellybutton shots most student have planned seem like a wast of time, doesn't it!?

T.S. Hall