On This Day: August 26

August 26 opens three doors at once: a color once reserved for the wealthy, a volcano that rewrote the sky, and a constitutional right won after decades of struggle. Three scenes show what happens when something that used to be locked away is suddenly open. 1

On August 26, 1856, eighteen-year-old chemist William Henry Perkin applied for a patent on the world's first synthetic dye. Working in his parents' attic in London, he had been trying to make cheap quinine for malaria treatment from aniline, a clear oil derived from coal tar. The experiment produced black sludge. When he rinsed it with alcohol, the sink—and a cloth he wiped it with—turned purple. 1

He first called the color Tyrian purple, then settled on mauve, or mauveine. Before this, purple dye came from Mediterranean sea snails—tens of thousands for a single garment. Perkin left school, built a factory with a loan from his father, and turned coal-tar waste into a mass-produced color. Queen Victoria later wore mauve and helped spark "mauve mania." The accident launched the modern synthetic-dye and chemical industries. 1

On August 26, 1883, the volcano Krakatoa, in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, entered its final, catastrophic stage. At about 1:00 p.m., the first of a series of violent explosions began. An hour later, a black ash cloud rose some 17 miles (27 km). The climax came the next morning: explosions heard as far as Australia, ash driven tens of miles high, and darkness over the region for days. 2

The volcano itself was largely uninhabited, but its collapse triggered tsunamis. The greatest wave reached about 120 feet (37 meters) and killed some 36,000 people in coastal towns of Java and Sumatra. Ash circled the Earth and painted sunsets for more than a year; average world temperatures fell slightly for one to three years. 2

On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was proclaimed part of the Constitution of the United States, establishing that the right to vote could not be denied or abridged on account of sex. Congress had passed the amendment in 1919. Tennessee became the decisive thirty-sixth state on August 18, 1920—by a single vote—after a struggle that stretched back through the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and decades of organizing. 3

The amendment was a landmark, but not a complete end to barriers. In practice, poor women and women of color in several states continued to face obstacles well into the twentieth century. Still, August 26 remains the day the federal Constitution formally opened the ballot on the basis of sex. 3

August 26 leaves three open doors: a color that left the palace for ordinary cloth, a mountain that tore open the sea, and a right written into the highest law of a country. Each one changed who could enter next.