HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 



Coloring is one of the most delightful arts, also a most responsible branch of manu- 

 facture; and a good dyer makes a manufacturer wealthy, happy, and renowned, while 

 a poor one brings ruin, bankruptcy, and misery; and not considering the fineness of the 

 cloth or the faultless weaver, the color sells the goods. 



This statement, by a dyer who started working a hundred years ago 

 (Haserick, 1869, p. 2), echoes a sentiment well understood by today's 

 colorists. 



It is difficult to imagine that before the mid- 19th century professional 

 dyers of fine silks and woolens had to rely on such homely substances as 

 dried insects, roots and leaves of plants, and chamber lye for carrying on 

 their work. The accidental discovery in 1856 by William Henry Perkin of 

 a lavender dye artificially produced from a constituent of coal tar marked 

 the first step in the decline of the use of natural dyestuffs and the rise of 

 the synthetic dye industry throughout the world. Today natural dyestuffs 

 have practically no economic importance. 



A fairly simple explanation for this almost complete rejection of materials 

 that had played such an important part in commercial and industrial life 

 during centuries past is that the quality and eflfectiveness of natural dye- 

 stuffs depended upon a great inany factors. The dyestuffs were difficult to 

 store, and much time was spent in extracting color from these raw materials 

 and imparting it in cloth. Dyes made in the laboratory do not depend 

 upon growing seasons and do not have to be ground or chipped before they 

 are ready for use. Many, such as indigo, are chemically identical to natural 

 dyes; since they are manufactured pure, their colors are unaff'ected by the 

 impurities that dim dyes of vegetable origin. Before synthetic indigo was 

 introduced to the market in 1897 natural indigo had been considered of 

 excellent quality if it yielded 48 percent of its weight in pure coloring matter. 



Today natural dyes are used in limited quantities by craftsmen in various 

 parts of the world. Although difficult to obtain commercially, dyes are 

 readily obtained from plant materials gathered in gardens, woods, and 

 along roadsides. Craftsmen are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about 

 this out-dated and time-consuming process for one of the reasons that 

 manufacturers rejected it: difficulty of standardization. Natural dyestuffs 

 produce offbeat, one-of-a-kind colors. No two dye lots are identical, each 

 having subtle differences due to impurities peculiar to the particular plant 



