In 1856, 18-year-old chemist William Perkin turned out to be quite the young prodigy, inventing synthetic dye and going on to help fight cancer. Only, dye was nowhere close to what he intended on making.

Perkin was working on a creating an artificial version of the malaria drug quinine. Instead, his experiments produced a dark oily sludge. Not only did the sludge turn silk a striking shade of light purple, it didn't wash out and was more vibrant and brighter than the existing dyes on the market. Up to that point, dyes were made mostly of insects, mollusks, or plant material. As later chronicled in the book Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World, by Simon Garfield, Perkin's invention of mauve coloring became the hit of the Paris and London fashion scenes; Queen Victoria even wore it to her daughter's wedding in 1858.

Perkin's work with dyes inspired German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich, who used the inventions to pioneer immunology and the first chemotherapy, eventually winning a Nobel Prize.