Well, I’ll be…

By Nancy June 1st, 2010

This morning while I was reading, I stumbled upon something that is apparently a well known, well documented subject that I had never, ever, thought about. The sentence I was reading started out as such: “With the invention of mauve in 1854…” What? Mauve was invented? What does that mean?

I immediately went to Google.

I found that the author of the book I am reading made an error: it looks like mauve was invented in 1856, not 1854. More importantly, I found many entries regarding a man named William Perkin as well as the following review of a 2000 book called Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World by Simon Garfield.

“Mauve is the story of a man who accidentally invented a color, and in the process transformed the world around him. Before 1856, the color in our lives – the reds, blues, and blacks and clothing, paint, print – came from insects or mollusks, roots or leaves, and dyeing was painstaking and expensive. But in 1856 eighteen-year-old English chemist William Perkin accidentally discovered a way to mass-produce color in a factory.
Working on a treatment for malaria in his London home laboratory, Perkin found mauve by chance. His experiments failed to result in artificial quinine as he had hoped, but produced instead a dark oily sludge that happened to turn silk a beautiful light purple. Mauve became the most desirable shade in the fashion houses of Paris and London, and quickly led to crimsons, violets, blues, and greens, earning its inventor a fortune. But its importance extends far beyond ballgowns.
Before mauve, chemistry was largely a theoretical science. Perkin’s discovery sparked new interest in industrial applications of chemistry research, which later brought about the development of explosives, perfume, photography, modern medicine, and today’s plastics industry.
Perkin is honored with the odd plaque and bust in colleges and chemistry clubs, but is otherwise a forgotten man. With great wit, scientific savvy, and historical scope, Simon Garfield delivers a fascinating tale of how this accidental genius set in motion an extraordinary scientific leap.”

I am an avid reader and this book is now the next on my list! FYI, the book I’m reading now that sparked this whole entry is called Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment by Sandra Steingraber.