Paints have been made for centuries by mixing pigments such as red lead, white lead, and umber with drying oils and it became obvious that these paints dried faster than raw oils. Eventually it was discovered that oils stored in presence of lead or manganese compounds (e.g. red lead or manganese oxide) or better still if heated in presence of these compounds developed improved drying properties. This formed the basis of the production of boiled linseed oil, one of the foundations of paint formulation. Boiled oil, varnishes, lead and manganese compounds sufficed as driers, until the turn of the century when the introduction of Zinc Oxide as a pigment gave only a very slow drying paint.

A search for improved driers for Zinc Oxide paints resulted in the discovery of Cobalt as the most active metal.

Until such time driers were incorporated into oil or varnish either by cooking directly into the medium or alternatively by cooking metal oxides into a smaller proportion of oil or into rosin, to give a concentrated linoleate or rosinate drier. Linoleate and rosinate driers deteriorate during storage because oxidation of the unsaturated acid content causes loss of solubility in solvents and oils.

T he major advance in drier technology occurred in the 1920s with the preparation of the metal naphthenates. The naphthenic acid is a mixture of acids of the same general structure. As the mixture would vary, so would the acid number, so that the metal content of the drier was not always the same from batch to batch. The next major advance in the technology was the preparation of solvent solutions of these metal naphthenates which allowed the metal content to be standardized.