7. The colour mauve
While 18 year old chemist, William Perkin, was busy researching a cure for malaria he accidentally ended up influencing the fashion world forever. In 1856 while working on one of his experiments something went terribly wrong, and he wound up creating was seemed to be nothing more than a murky mess. As he pondered what had gone wrong, William noticed a beautiful colour radiating from the petri dish. And thus the world’s first synthetic dye was born.
Perkin dropped out of school and his father, George, used his entire life savings to build a factory that produced mauve-colored items. Within a few years, the family had made a small fortune.