series demonstrator don showalter re-creates perkin's experiment. at 18, perkin was already a dedicated chemist. school was out on easter break, but he was in his basement trying to make a cure for malaria. he thought that if he combined these white crystals of aniline sulfate with these orange crystals of potassium dichromate that he would make quinine. here's the way he did it. he took some of the aniline sulfate... put it into a flask of water. that ought to be about enough. then he added some of the potassium dichromate. and he mixed it and then heated it in a warm bath. this is the old hot water bath. he got a reaction, but it wasn't the reaction he was looking for. instead of quinine, he got this black precipitate that came out of it. he knew that that wasn't quinine. but instead of stopping there, he was curious about this black material and wondered what it would look like, so he filtered it. we'll pour it through the filter paper. look at this black gunk. when perkin dissolved the gunk in alcohol, the solution had a deep purple color. he wa