Your clothes, your furniture, the sheets on your bed, the Rams jersey in your closet. You are surrounded by products using synthetic dyes. It’s literally in the fabric of our lives. Did this come to be after teams of researchers spent decades looking for alternatives to the natural dyes that cost too much and are far more limited? No.
An 18-year-old scientist named William Henry Perkin was working on a cure for malaria in 1856 and accidentally invented synthetic dye.
Kevlar, balloons, camcorders, and silly putty, the list of products in our lives that started off as happy accidents or unintended consequences is endless.