Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World - Hardcover

Garfield, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393020053 ISBN 13: 9780393020052

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2001

Synopsis

Offers a study of the color mauve--created in 1856 by eighteen-year-old English chemist William Perkin, who was working on a treatment for malaria in his home laboratory and accidentally discovered what became the most desired shade in fashion and ultimately led to the development of explosives, perfume, photography, and modern medicine.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Garfield is the author of several acclaimed books, including The End of the Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award. He lives in London.

Reviews

The man was William Perkin (1838-1907), an English chemist. The color was mauve, which he discovered by accident when he was 18. "While working on an experiment, I failed," he said many years later, "and was about to throw a certain black residue away when I thought it might be interesting." The experiment was an effort to make synthetic quinine, and the black residue was coal tar. Perkin's accidental discovery gave rise to industrial aniline and the modern synthetic-dye industry, as well as to a number of other processes employing coal-tar derivatives. It also, Garfield says, "affected the whole nature of scientific investigation: for the first time, people realized that the study of chemistry could make them rich." Perkin became rich and received a knighthood. Garfield, a Londoner who writes about science, tells the Perkin and aniline stories well.

Editors of Scientific American

British writer Garfield presents the latest chapter in a burgeoning literature of material science, merrily telling the serendipitous story of mauve, the first mass-produced artificial color, which was the creation of an intuitive and indefatigable 18-year-old London chemist. A bit of a prodigy, William Perkins set up a home laboratory to augment his college studies in 1856 and decided to try his hand at synthesizing quinine, which was in great demand as malaria raged across the British empire. Working with coal tar, an abundant waste product, he failed in his mission but was quite taken with the "strangely beautiful color" of the powder he produced. Perkins ended up inventing the first aniline dye, then cheekily developed a process for its commercial manufacture. Worn by Queen Victoria, mauve soon became all the rage (Punch lampooned the fad as "Mauve Measles"), and Perkins became a wealthy man. Ultimately Perkins' discovery earned him a knighthood and led to important advances in medicine, photography, and many other fields. His nearly forgotten career is chronicled by Garfield with palpable pleasure. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Since his discovery of the first synthetic dye in 1856, interest in William Perkin has undergone a resurgence approximately every 50 years. Garfield's (The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS) biography follows in the footsteps of A Jubilee Proceedings (1906) and a centenary supplement to the organic chemistry journal Tetrahedron (1956). It focuses on Perkin as a pioneer, taking research from the burgeoning field of academic chemistry and applying it to industry. The creation of a popular dye from coal-tar (a plentiful industrial waste) when the field of dyeing was beholden to natural dyes, such as indigo and madder, made Perkin very rich and fleetingly famous. The book also chronicles the influence of this discovery throughout the industry and into other fields. That the use of stains and dyes eventually transformed biochemistry and medicine is ironic, given that Perkin was originally seeking a cure for malaria when he stumbled onto the mauve dye. Recommended for science collections in academic and large public libraries. Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393020053
• ISBN 13: 9780393020052
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222