Bromine was not prepared in quantity until 1860 but compounds of bromine were of some considerable importance well before it was recognised as an element. Long ago an excretion from a particular kind of mussel was used to make a purple dye called "Tyrian purple". It is now known that a key compound in this process is an organobromine compund.
It seems that an undergraduate chemist called Carl Löwig studying at Heidelberg presented one of his lecturers, Leopold Gmelin, with a sample of bromine that he had made over the summer holidays. Löwig's exams interrupted his studies long enough to allow a report from Antoine-Jérôme Balard to take precedence in 1826.