1856 summer vacation, willaim henley Pan Qin, a British college student who was only 18 years old, accidentally found that the black precipitate at the bottom of the bottle would turn bright purple when dissolved in alcohol during the process of chemical synthesis of Cinchona cream. This wonderful image made Pan Qinmeng think of dyeing cloth with color. He put his white handkerchief into the solution, and it immediately turned purple, and the color never faded. Pan Qin named this color "Aniline Purple". After Pan Qin's invention was patented by the British government, he established the world's first artificial dye factory.
Around 1863, Pan Qin successively invented synthetic dyes such as aniline red, aniline green, aniline yellow and Hough violet. 1868, Germans Grabe and Lieberman synthesized artificial madder red. 1880, Bayer company in Germany synthesized Indian blue, which is called "natural dye emperor".